RS354: The State Of Podcasting Heading Into 2026

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Hello, welcome back to Rogue Startups. I'm your host Craig Hewitt. I'm back after a very long hiatus. Thank you for sticking with me and welcome back to the podcast. I've been gone because I did a hundred days of AI. 100 days in a row of a YouTube video all about AI. If you haven't checked it out yet, links in the description below, you can go check it out. Would love to maybe not watch all of the videos, but kind of pick and choose the ones you want. But it took an enormous amount of time and that's the reason for the kind of lapse in podcast episodes over the last hundred days or so. But I'm back. We'll be getting episodes out most weeks. I can't promise every week going forward. But I'm back. I'm on the mic and this week I'm joined by my friend Colin Gray from Alitu and the podcast host, Colin is another guy in the podcasting space. We have a really great discussion here about podcasting, about YouTube, about Spotify, about content and kind of where all this is going. And then of course I had to throw in, how does AI affect all of this? Not like, hey, are you using Claude or ChatGPT? But like, hey, what's the expectation of your customers for your product? With AI being a part of the mix, how are you thinking about using AI AI smartly in your product to meet your customers needs and expectations? Colin's a super smart dude. He's been in content longer than I have, which is like pretty long and they're exceptional at it over there. So I think you'll really like this conversation with Colin Gray from the podcast host Andala too. 10 plus years. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. I mean it's, it's, you know, it's funny because I think it's changed a lot and in some ways things are the same. So I'm interested to dig into it. [00:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, has anything changed? Has it ever changed as much as it has in the past year? I mean, the nine years before that, did it change as much as the past year? [00:01:57] Speaker A: You know, I think on the surface the obvious answer is like, no. Like the last year has been crazy. I think if you get over the hype of AI, which I think is what you're referring to, the kind of psychology and the human connection is still the same and maybe even more right. Like I think the more that we get pulled in the AI direction, the more that people want like human in person, genuine connection which like you Know, I get on a lot of calls with customers, and they're like, oh, we think we want to start a podcast. And sometimes I push back on that. I'm like, do you really want to start a podcast like that? That might not be the best thing for your business, but, you know, you're a consultant or a coach and you have an audience. Like, podcasting, a hundred percent is the best thing you can do. But if you're like, hey, nobody knows of me, I'm going to. I want to. I want to create a piece of content and a channel to like, grow my audience. Podcasting is pretty tough, but I think if you're that former, it still is the best use of your time. And I think, like, you and I are a bit in that position, which, like, we have, like, a platform. People know us, they just want to hear from us and get to know better. Like, podcasting still wins, but. But it's not the answer for everybody all the time. [00:02:58] Speaker B: No. And it's. I mean, this. This is kind of one of the things that's going through my head the most at the moment is what is podcasting in three years, five years, maybe even less than that, Maybe a year's time. Like, there's something around. I. I like to be clear, I don't think the medium of audio on the Internet, the way podcasting is currently delivered, is going away. It's just that it seems to be subsumed so much more into it's. It's existing less almost as a. Of its own. In many ways. Maybe that's not true. I don't know. What do you think of that? Like, my kind of vague view on it is that it's. It seems to be existing less in a view and as a medium of its own, because most people that come in new to the content space don't really see it as a thing on its own. They see it as a part of, you know, creating video and maybe having an audio alternative or maybe publishing both to the RSS feed, or maybe it's a longer form version of their social media. All of that kind of stuff. Like, what do you. Does that make sense? What do you think of that? [00:03:51] Speaker A: I. I agree, and I probably look at it the same way. You know, I think I'm as guilty for someone in the. You know, I know there are people who push back heavily against YouTube. I think that's mostly what you're talking about is, like, YouTube and, you know, the social content, the shorts and stuff is the thing that's taking the place in some people's kind of mental space of podcasting in terms of priorities at least. And I think that I'm probably as guilty as anyone of that. Like, you know, we were talking before we started recording, which by the way is the famous quote of every podcast. Like the good stuff is before we record, you know, I just finished up with a big, a big YouTube push. I published a hundred videos in a hundred days, all about AI and I did podcast at all in that time. Yeah, because I kind of made the conscious decision like, hey, me, for myself and my whatever personal brand, it's more important to carve out a wedge on YouTube for me right now than it is to continue with the podcast that like, you know, my podcast has been pretty like low effort and static for a long time. So I wanted to do something new and different. And I think it's probably easier to grow a YouTube channel than it is a podcast these days. [00:04:53] Speaker B: Did you rebroadcast any of that? Like, did you even think about taking some of those your 100 days and repurposing them as audio only? [00:04:59] Speaker A: No, I didn't even think about it, no. [00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah, just a similar thing. I mean, there's a lot to be said for that focus, isn't there? Your focus is grow the YouTube channel and as soon as you add in the. Oh, but I could make some audio only versions of this, put it on RSS feed, all that kind of stuff that suddenly that takes away the focus for sure. Yeah, I actually think I was referring to YouTube in many ways, but actually I think it's even bigger than that. Like I think. Did you see. Do you know Beehive as a platform? [00:05:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So email platform, if you're not out there, if you're out there listening, you haven't seen it. It's a. Originally an email platform that kind of pitched themselves as you can grow email. They're similar to substack in some ways, but more tools built in. They had a big launch event yesterday and I don't know if you saw this, Craig, but they've added podcasting into their mix now. So podcasting, they're doing hosting, they're doing, including the podcast into the newsletter. And I think so even more than just like the YouTube crossover, there's now a lot of. And, and I've seen this in Kit as well. So Kit is what I use for my email marketing and Kit has their app store and they have now podcast players built in and, and we're looking to integrate with that and have a podcast player as an example, so that it's built into Kit, and therefore our users can just place their player right into their newsletter. And so that's just another place to listen to it. It's coming from the RSS feed. You're going to take it from there. But it's all into email marketing as well, in that case. And so I almost think it's like, it's going to be all of it down the road. Video and audio for sure, but then email as well, and then social and then. I mean, it's always been kind of integrated with blogging, hasn't it, with embedding players. [00:06:29] Speaker A: But from like. From like a, you know, alitude, business owner perspective, do you say. Because, like, you know, I'll. I give you a hard time a little bit. Like, you guys added hosting, you know, last year, and I was like, motherfucker. Like, you know, like, do you. Do you look at that and say, like, we gotta add blogging now and we gotta add email and we gotta add, like, social and we gotta add, you know, video, and we gotta. We gotta be the HubSpot of a content platform. Or do you say we do podcasting? It's what we do. We're pretty good at it and we want to integrate with other tools like Kit and all these places that. That our customers are doing other stuff. [00:07:04] Speaker B: I think it's exactly that. Yeah, we were. I mean, yeah, it's a good question. Like, we editing first. So our product was podcast editing to start with. And that was where our strength was. It was how to figure out how to make editing easier, automate some parts of that audio cleanup came in as well. And we expanded out beyond that just because the goal, the overall goal, the strategy, the aspiration was to make creating your podcast as easy as possible. And the more we went down the road of just having editing, the more people were complaining about then still having to record whatever else and upload it to us. So we're like, well, we could build some recording. And actually that brings some streamliness into the process and actually brings some advantages because then suddenly you could have a little, you know, signal button where you make a mistake, and then you can make a bookmark and that bookmark then goes into the editing. So the two together actually work quite nicely. And so then, yeah, it was a natural. Same thing with the hosting, because they were then downloading the file, taking it elsewhere. And yeah, we still integrated with other hosts, but I honestly though that I look back at some of that and think that was too far. Like, I Think we've got a great product just now that covers so much of the podcast ecosystem. It's a great one all in one thing. But I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if we just stuck to editing a lot and just concentrated only on that. I don't know what the product would look like and whether it would be better. Like, what have your thoughts been over the years? Like running a hosting product and what you add and what you don't. [00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that, you know, we're really fortunate with hosting that it's very sticky. You know, you on the editing side may see like higher churn people coming and going and stuff like that. Like our churn. We're very lucky. It's extremely low. You know, we have a great product, we have a great team, we have great documentation, we have great systems all around, you know, reducing churn. I think if you look at just like from a higher level business perspective, like, how can you grow? You can grow in your space by getting more customers. You can get existing customers to pay you more money, which may be where like expanding your product comes in, or you can just go to the next door neighbor kind of industry that your existing customers already are, which is like, if you're a podcasting whatever, can you either extend your platform to be like a blogging platform or social media platform, or just build a whole separate thing and then have two different companies? Which is kind of like what you do, right? With a podcast host being like a content, a content play, but you also sell like content memberships and stuff like that. So like, I think either of the any of those are fair, right? Get more customers, get existing customers, pay you more money either via more or different products. From a business perspective, I think from a mindshare perspective, I think the reality is we are not the cutest girl at the dance anymore in podcasting. [00:09:30] Speaker B: Is podcasting as an industry, like as a medium, as a whole? [00:09:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the most. I mean, I run a podcasting company and the podcast is not the most important thing for me in my, in my marketing. Here's. Here's a perfect example I had on Stephen Robles from Riverside for our podcast and I said, hey man, like, tell me about your guys podcast. They don't have one, right? Yeah, they don't have one. The feed from Libsyn shut down this week. I know like you this, this podcast you guys have had for a long time, but I think it's just kind of telling like of the major hosts and you know, podcast players, 20% have a podcast, but all of them have a blog. Most of them have a YouTube channel. [00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So if that's the case, then is it. Is. Is YouTube the now current, most popular? [00:10:11] Speaker A: To me it is, yeah. [00:10:13] Speaker B: There's still, I mean, that's the, that's the question though, isn't it? That's the tension is there's still podcasting. Like, the podcast listenership has never been as high as, you know, it's, it's grown, but it's never been as regular and as, and as popular as video on the telly. You know, people watch telly and YouTube has grown into that as well, so it's now competing with Netflix and the like. But there's always been a real core super. The way I've always seen it is how much more engaged that audience is. It's always so much smaller, but actually it's just about as engaged. If you look at like the kind of conversion per thousand, let's say. Do you know what I mean? So if you have a thousand podcast listeners, you might convert 500 of them, but if have 10,000 YouTube listen watchers, you might still only convert 500 of. It's just way lower conversion. So the numbers almost don't matter, but they kind of do because when it, when it comes to putting the resource into it, it's always quite hard to track that conversion. And therefore you tend towards the things that have the highest, don't you? [00:11:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think what you're saying is kind of what I was alluding to earlier, which is like, for certain types of people in certain situations, a podcast is by far the most valuable kind of marketing, real brand, real estate they can have. I think maybe the rub is that's not everyone or even people. I think that's the difference. You know, what's interesting is like, even, like I publish on, you know, social and YouTube and stuff, but most people know me from my podcast, maybe because I've been doing it for 10 years, maybe because it's the way that people actually get to know you well as opposed to, you know, freaking Twitter or whatever. [00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you seen that? I mean, it's, it's the same. The debate's going on a lot right now around video versus audio and everything and, and the kind of, the, the, the confluence of YouTube and podcasting and the fact that many, many podcasts starting these days, the, the newer generation of podcasters, they don't even think about the RSS feed. They actually just see the podcast as being a YouTube show. But it's just the fact that it's appearances, isn't it? I think Brian Barletta and Tom Webster did a study around this a while back where they found that the biggest. With certain age groups, I can't remember the exact denominations, but with certain age groups, the word podcast doesn't mean anything other than two people chatting to each other with microphones in view. So it's, it's literally just the aesthetics of it. It's nothing to do with where it is, where you watch it, where you listen, what the format is. As long as you can see two people and two microphones. [00:12:31] Speaker A: You know, that's the Colin and Samir thing, right? Like that's a podcast, but everyone knows it as a YouTube channel. That's, you know, Stephen Bartlett and Diary of a CEO. Those are podcasts. They just are, they just happen to be ultra popular YouTube channels. [00:12:45] Speaker B: And I don't think that matters. Like I'm not one of these stuck to the RSS feed people. Like, I don't really care about that. It's more, even if we got rid of the name podcast, it's more just like conversational content essentially. It's like long form conversational content. That's what we love and what we teach them to do. [00:13:01] Speaker A: I do, I do think that the difference in, you know, again, when we're chatting with customers and from a content strategy perspective, the really big difference is like the intentionality and how you approach this thing that you're creating. So you call it a podcast, you call it a YouTube channel or whatever. Like you asked about like did I publish my Hundred Days of AI as a podcast? No, because like a hundred percent of those videos were meant to be YouTube videos, not podcast episodes. Like we, we could, we could repurpose this conversation. But this is a podcast. It probably will do better overall as a podcast. You know, me talking about how I'm using Claude code as a non developer to build SaaS or whatever doesn't fly as a podcast. And I think that like as folks are looking at like what do I want to do? I think always the question is like what channel are you optimizing this thing for? And do really, really, really good there. And yeah, you might get carry over to the other channels, but it's not going to be, it's not going to perform the same. And so like that, that's kind of what we, we coach folks. And I guess like that's how, that's how I think about it. Like this is a podcast episode. I'm Optimizing this for audio. Audio. We'll put it on YouTube, but I kind of don't care what happens there. [00:14:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think. I think it's. Some of it doesn't. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't matter. It's down to business aims. It's down to. Or your personal aims. It might not be for a business, it might just be a hobby and you just want to grow a community around it or have an impact around a charity or something like that. [00:14:17] Speaker A: But it's. [00:14:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:18] Speaker A: Can I ask you a question about Spotify? And speaking of Stephen Bartlett, you know his flightcast? Oh, yeah, it's funny, I. I know the guy, his co founder there. Rocks. [00:14:29] Speaker B: Rocks. [00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we actually chatted about you. Can we, like, do something together? I didn't know Stephen Bartlett was like the guy behind this. We talked probably a year and a half ago. You know, they're getting access to come to a special Spotify API to publish YouTube videos. They're publishing the YouTube first and then pulling down audio, which is like backwards from how, like, I think we do it. You know, what do you. And then I saw a thing from Jay Clouse this week about, like, his success on Spotify with video and how he's thinking about his, you know, exactly this conversation. Like, what is this piece of content I'm creating? What medium am I optimizing it for? And like, where is that? Is where is that published? Like, I don't know what. What do you think about, like, Spotify as a video platform, I guess is the question. [00:15:13] Speaker B: I struggle with it because I. It's always hard to separate your biases from, you know, what reality is, isn't it? Because I start. I was a very early Spotify user, like first couple, first year or two of it launching, and I have used it. So I've used it for like decade plus. Is that a couple of decades now? Might even be. I can't remember now, but. [00:15:33] Speaker A: Oh, wow, okay. [00:15:33] Speaker B: So it's just music. Spot music to me. And when they got into podcasting, it was when we were in podcasting as well. It was like five, 10 years or whatever after I'd started using it. So I was like, this is weird. And I was already an established podcast listener. I use some, like, over the top podcast listening apps that no normal people use. So I didn't swap. And I don't think the Spotify listening experience for podcasts is very good in my opinion, like, for the way I listen to podcasts. So I never switched. And Spotify is still and always will be, I think just a music. Okay. So I have never. And I don't see myself ever, ever watching video on there. And I don't know what would make change that. That's probably just my ingrained habits. But I don't know, like, where are you at with it? Do you use it as a listening app or do you think it's a place to watch? Do you do it there? [00:16:16] Speaker A: So I don't. I literally never use Spotify. No, I. Partly because like I signed up for an account when we were in France and now that we're back in the US like I can't log in and all this and I'm just like, fuck it, like, whatever. [00:16:28] Speaker B: Not using it. [00:16:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean we at home, we play music through Amazon Music just because it's free on Alexa and in. On my phone, I only listen to say I listen to one podcast these days and it's. The rest is history. British podcast only when I'm at the gym. It's the only time I listen to podcasts these days. The rest of the time it's either music or I listen to YouTube videos in the car. [00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. [00:16:53] Speaker A: And I. And I. My podcasting app, right? Yeah, yeah. And I, I can watch the video in my car. But like I almost got in a wreck like five times the one day that I like hooked it up and I was like, no, we're not doing this. So I just put the phone in the cup holder and just listen. But I listen on Overcast on my, on my phone. That's it. And I just, I don't much similar for me. [00:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I've uploaded a few videos. Have you tried it yet with Spotify? You've not been podcasting for a little while, so maybe not. [00:17:18] Speaker A: No, it's a pain in the ass. Like, you know, we, we don't have access to the super secret Spotify API to publish video and no one else does either. And so to do it, I would have to go specifically to Spotify for creators or whatever and upload the video separate from my publishing cadence and Kastos. [00:17:35] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Same here. What's your. Because you have video hosting in Kastos. What do you have an idea what you're going to split is like how many people, percentage wise, actually, the video hosting as opposed to audio? [00:17:45] Speaker A: A couple percent. [00:17:45] Speaker B: Is it tiny? [00:17:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Mostly because of that. It's an incomplete solution. Like we publish video and it goes to Apple and it goes to a few other places and then places like overcast actually will take the video and strip it down to audio. But Spotify's blocked. I think iheart is blocked. A couple that's probably wrong, but. But a couple other. Just like, it just doesn't work at all. And so it's like, gosh, where do. [00:18:05] Speaker B: You think the software, the podcast software industry goes from here? Because it is really tricky that way. Like people are. You're right, I saw that as well. I've talked to Rocks a few times too about like, whether we can know editing and hosting and blah, blah, blah. But it's frustrating when you see other companies like, I got in touch with Apple not that long ago asking like, how, how can we get access to. You know, I've seen a few platforms now showing your engagement stats, the stuff that you can only get podcasts connect. Uh, and I've seen there's a few platforms now actually have that in built like, oh, where did that come from? How can I get hold of that? And Apple are notoriously very secretive, obviously, and it's very tricky. And it turns out actually there are ways that we could do it, but it's like you have to set up custodial accounts and all this kind of background stuff that then we have to manage. So it's really tricky. I mean, I don't know, it's hard to think where, if we have some companies like FlightCast, like getting that access because they have such a huge influencer that basically has influence over Spotify, where does the rest of the company, where does everyone else go, you know? [00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So when delegated delivery from Apple first came out, which is like the ability to have like paid content directly in Apple, which like we've had, I paid content well before delegated delivery, but not like natively in the Apple Podcast mobile app. That's kind of all that it adds and like this concept of like what we call hybrid podcast, like free and paid stuff all in one fee. When that came out, we were not part of it. There was four hosting providers that were part of it and Matt Medeiros, who was part of our team then, was like losing his mind. He's like, the company's over. Like, it's just never going to work. Everyone's going to leave. And you know what happened? Nothing. Like, absolutely nothing. And then we got access to delegate delivery in kind of the second tranche of it. And you know what happen? Nothing. So. So, like, I shouldn't say nothing. Like, do we get one customer a month or two customers a month because of that maybe is everyone use I don't know anyone who uses it. And even like on our platform, I can tell you, out of thousands of customers, handfuls use it. And so I just look at it and say, like, this is the reality of podcasting, I think. And I think this is the reality of most software. Most software is. There's a. There's a really finite amount of things that people care about, and if you do that, then the rest of it they don't care about. Like people want out of a podcast is I want to publish my stuff and it go everywhere very reliably and I don't ever want to have to worry about it. And then if you can tell me a little bit of something about who's listening, that's cool. I think that's just. That's the kind of software that we are. I think you, you, you will like the recording and editing, like might. Might have the opportunity for more gains, but a podcast hosting platform, it's like you just can't stuff a lot more value into what we do. There are other softwares where that's not the case. [00:20:49] Speaker B: Y. I could reflect that. Yeah, for sure. Like our editing side of things. Like, we built our current editing product up over the first few years and kind of covered the core pains, the big pains, like how to make actually cutting out mistakes easier, how to make splitting easier, that kind of stuff. And we've made it so much better over the last five years since then. But it is, it's incremental gains, as we said, covering that. And I think there's still space. There's plenty of things we can work on, we could work on, we are working on that can make a difference. But I think you're right. It's never going to be as big as going from no editing to some editing. [00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:21:22] Speaker B: And I think you're right. The hope that I would have as well is that part of the reason why things like delegated delivery maybe don't have that much of an impact is it's just not open, is it? And I think it's partly why Spotify is probably going to struggle longer term with their video play as well, potentially, because it is a separate place. Like you say you have to go and do a different job just for that platform. You know that only a small portion. Well, not a small portion. Maybe a third of your listeners are listening there, watching there. So you're doing this whole extra job just for that. With Apple, with a delegated delivery, particularly, you're. You're trying to monetize and, you know, earn some money out of your show and help your listeners get this extra great content that you want to deliver to them. But it's only going to go to a quarter of the third of them because that's the number that use Apple podcasts to listen. So it's all of these things that are not open, that are not available to everyone, that are not, you know, universal across the whole industry or the whole listenership that just cause trouble, I think really diminish interest in them. [00:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I think one of the, one of the big questions that comes up a lot for us is like, like monetization. And of course there's like multiple ways to monetize a podcast. We kind of break it down into like direct and indirect. Direct being like ads, donations, paid subscriptions. And indirect is like I podcast to sell more Casto stuff, you know, through my kind of whatever, personal brand or whatever. I don't, I don't. We will never run ads on, on my podcast or anything. I think that monetization and the accessibility of monetization is a, is a challenge in the industry. Industry partly because it's a decentralized experience, you know, as opposed to like YouTube. I don't know, like, how do you guys see monetization? Because I think that if, if it was easy to make a bunch of money from podcasting, more people would come to it. You know, it's probably the reality. [00:23:04] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's. It's going back to that question that really works well for, that you brought up. That works really, really well for coaches, consultants, personal brands, anyone who is a high ticket product with low numbers, low volume. But it just doesn't work that as well for monetizing anything slow to. Yeah, I think the way we look at it is we've looked a few times adding advertising to, to our episode builder. There's a couple of. There's a few lovely ways. I think you'd add advertising marketplaces, dynamic ads, all that kind of stuff to our episode builder. Because our episode builder is built in that way already. It's block based. So you could have an ad block. Yeah, Your first part, your interview, your ad block, your second part, you could make that block. You know, it could be a dynamic ad, or it could be a host red ad, or it could be whatever you want to build in and it'd be really simple to then to swap that out and to replace it in the old catalog and stuff. But when we added hosting, that was part of the thought. It was part of the idea that it would tie into our, the method that we use to build an episode and enable that. But our, our audience has always been beginners and it always, I think it always will be because our whole philosophy is how to make it as easy as possible to build your episode. And as soon as people get big enough numbers to actually benefit from advertising, they often just get a team member who produces the podcast for them anyway. In which case they get this professional editor who Alitud's not built for. It's not built for professional editor and I don't think we ever will have it built for them. So advertising just wasn't a monetization method that suited our audience essentially the way that our audience, the later stage ones, we've got all the beginners, we've got all the mid stage podcasters that stick with us for, for years. But then the later stage ones that stick with us are the ones that stay independent and it's still just them and they keep their workflow pretty simple. And their monetization method is things like community support. So premium content donations. Premium content is an interesting one in that we could build that quite easily because it fits the same kind of thing we could build have our episode builder with the blocks. This dynamic block appears in the episode if you are a non subscriber but as soon as you're a subscriber that disappears and therefore it's suddenly ad free. Or you've got a piece of content, a block that you add in which is a behind the scenes that's only available to subscribers and it's dynamic but it's. So it's akin to advertising, dynamic ads, but it's actually a different thing. It's about building a custom premium piece of content. So that's kind of where we've looked at it for sure. And I think that's the way it would suit us and the independent podcasters that we were at. [00:25:24] Speaker A: Sure. [00:25:25] Speaker B: What's is there. Are there ways that you do it just now? [00:25:27] Speaker A: So yeah, I mean the episod is. It's like an all or nothing thing. The episode is public or private. We have a concept of like hybrid podcasting where in a feed you can have public and private content that can be either free or paid. So like gated. Gated based on email or whatever membership site ads are on a podcast level. So you can't have ads on some pod, some episodes and not another. So if you wanted like an ad free version you would. No, that's not true. With hybrid podcasting you can have one of the benefits is what we call it is like ad free or like early release or whatever. So that's kind of how we do it. But for ads it's like on an episode level it's all or nothing. Can't like, you know, whatever. So yeah, we, we, we use a company called soundstack which is like a marketplace and they do all the, all the ad injection and everything and they've been good. You know, it's just like an off the shelf thing. We just kind of buy but it's only pre roll and post roll, mid roll. And like what we call bring your own we don't have. We're looking at building it. That would probably be like the next big feature we build is like bring your own own. So kind of like dynamic content management is what we would call it. Where like it's even not, not even an ad, but I think it's pretty cool is like, you know, if I was still podcasting in my 100 days of AI, I would have had like a, a bit like, hey, I'm in the middle of 100 days of AI right now. Go to the YouTube channel and check it out. And then afterwards I could just turn that off and then all of the feed and all the episodes would get re rendered without that instead of having to hard like. And of course this is how you guys do it. Um, but this is a pretty, this is a pretty big thing that people are asking for. It's one of the few things that people are asking for and we've kind of just said for a long time like it's feel like that would really change a. Like that's a whole big product. [00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:02] Speaker A: And so we've resisted it because like back to the, like, how much do most people really care about that? Most people don't care about it. Some people care kind of a lot. [00:27:10] Speaker B: But most people don't. I know, it's so tricky. That's one of the hardest things I've found about running a product over the years is that exact balance. It's the. How do you, how do you. Well prioritize the requests when there's, you know, you've got different volumes. So this is more popular than that. But then you've got. This is much harder than that. And then this is actually much more on trend than that. [00:27:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:31] Speaker B: You know, there's so many variables to it and all of it takes investment to plan out to, to spec out to then start building to release and market. And how much impact does it have? Long Term as well. [00:27:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How the, the obligatory, like, AI conversation. And I guess this is where most people, some people will drop off. And I'm. And I'm sorry, but I think it's. It's just so, so fascinating. Like. Yeah, yeah. Outside of like, you know, is AI cool and. And how we're using IT stuff, how are you seeing AI affect your customers and maybe their expectation of you? [00:28:04] Speaker B: Oh, that's it. I've not heard it. I've not had it asked that way. What do you mean? So affect our customers as in how they create their content, or you mean affect them as in what they're asking of us? [00:28:14] Speaker A: Both, I guess. Yeah. So, like, how. How. How is AI making creating content easier or harder for your customers? And then how. How do you fit in that in the sense of like, oh, we have AI stuff or we're complimentary to AI or whatever. [00:28:30] Speaker B: Yeah, the last part first. Like we said in it, in that we've got a lot of AI stuff built into Alitu for sure. So we've got the, you know, the audio cleanup's been in there for years. That's got better and better, more and more AI powered down to being able to remove dog barks and stuff like that these days. Like, that's. I don't know, it's like a job that you just don't have to do anymore. You barely mean that math you had a conversation around. Do you even have to worry about your gear and your studio these days? And you do still, like, I think is definitely well worthwhile doing that. But equally, you can also go out as we did and record an episode on the main street in Edinburgh, the capital of our country. Very, very noisy. And it came out fine because actually nearly all of it was removed and our voices were completely ramped up and EQ'd and everything. And it's mental how good it is. So everything from that to adding in transitions and music. And a lot of it's not technically the modern now the new presentation of AI, but it's a tool doing something automatically for you. We have built in some kind of tr. Modern AI, as in titles and descriptions. So that's the obvious one that we really struggle with. So that was a nice little pain to solve. And so, yeah, there's a few things in there like that, like tons of things that really assist people in making their stuff. We've been working, though, on building out. We also. So we also have our show planner. We built this tool a couple of years ago called our show planner. Which is more about helping people get past that first stage where they actually have go from a vague idea of what they want to talk about to having an A4 page in front of them that includes their audience avatar, their weakness for their show, their pitch for their show, maybe even their first five episodes, that kind of stuff. And that's been working really nicely for quite a while as a free tool just to help people get started. And then we can try and help them actually start it with Altun. So we've been trying, We've been starting to build on top of that other elements of the more soft skills of podcasting, like the episode planning, like guest finding, like guest outreach, like marketing tactics, all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of the next thing for us. I think it's. I worry though, that it's. It's something that basically every other company is building. They're building an assistant, an AI assistant for all a lot of jobs and how you make it stand out from just using Claude or ChatGPT. And we have actually some really interesting smart ideas around that I think that do make it genuinely better than that, but I think that's a real danger. Is that something you're thinking about just now, like how you build this type of tools or that kind of assistance? [00:30:46] Speaker A: Yeah, like, we have a, we have a, you know, we call it the AI assistant. It does show notes and titles and social posts and all the, all the stuff. Right. Because we get the transcript anyhow and we send it to assembly and assembly has, you know, Claude under the hood that we, that we call. And that's cool. Like it's, it's good. Like it's really quite good. We've had automatic chapters for a long time. We transcribe all the episodes like it's free inside the platform. So, so we've had. And we've had that for like, like years. And we just pay, you know, we pay. So we pay assembly 800 bucks a month or something, you know, for, for basically giving away all that functionality to customers because it's expected. Back to the question of, like, what do people expect? People expect all that stuff. And so it's just kind of like the increased cost of doing business so that I think the, the place in general is most valuable is doing something that people can't do by themselves with ChatGPT or Claude. So, like, probably, okay, we'll pull your analytics in and we'll pull all of your content and we'll say like, hey, what works really well? What have you talked about that did. Well, what haven't you talked about that you should talk about when you Release on Tuesday versus Thursday or 10 o' clock versus 4 o'. Clock. It does better. Like that's the kind of stuff that like nobody else can do. And so, so if you're looking at like building AI to do a thing, doing that, that is probably the play. [00:32:01] Speaker B: It's. It's finding the data you have that no one else does does it? And as it's defensible as a creator platform, both of us have so much information about the topic that the person talks about. The way they're, you know, what their voice is like, the. What they have covered, what they haven't. Those gaps, the type of guests they get, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, totally. [00:32:19] Speaker A: That's. [00:32:19] Speaker B: That's how we're thinking about it as well, is how to use that data essentially to make it more useful. And I think there as well, there's something around interface too. I actually, I was listening to an episode of. You ever Come the show Cheeky Pint by the Straight co founder. [00:32:34] Speaker A: No, no. [00:32:34] Speaker B: It's really cool, actually. [00:32:35] Speaker A: Oh, no, I have, I have. I didn't know that was the name of it. [00:32:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's by Patrick Collison. Is that his name? That might be the other brother, actually. Not the one that's on the show, but he's. He talks to really interesting people and he had the CEO of Anthropicon recently, they had a whole conversation that was really interesting actually. And one of the things they brought up was that models are getting so good, but chatbots haven't and may never have because it's not really their function. Much of a ui, much of a ux to actually help people Sol solve. And that's where the next layer comes in, where you make a specialist tool that actually, it's still just a chatbot under the hood, but it's the UX really that actually makes it far more useful. Partly, partly solving that blank page problem, as in giving you some prompts like here, like so the AI prompting you as opposed to the other way around. Like, here's where you could start, here's where our next step might be, blah, blah, blah. Here's some output that you can actually edit as opposed to looking at Claude and saying, oh, that sentence does work. Can you edit that for me? Because I can't go in there and delete this. So I found that really interesting actually around that being where tools like us could utilize those models and actually make something really for Our customers. [00:33:39] Speaker A: I think a good mental model here, pun not intended, I guess, is, is. Is like, if you were starting today from scratch, how would you make your product AI first? And. And how would we make our product AI first? And I think that probably answering that and doing mostly that is like a really smart thing. Is like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna have AI at the center of content creation. It's gonna do all the ideation, it's gonna do the research, and somebody's going to show up and record and edit and publish. I think that's probably the answer. [00:34:08] Speaker B: Knocking that question back to you for your 100 days of YouTube, how did you use it to make that actually sustainable? Because that is a huge job. Like, did you use AI a lot to make that much more doable? [00:34:19] Speaker A: I didn't. Ironically. I didn't. I didn't because. Ah, no, that's not entirely true. I used it a lot for titles and thumbnails. I use a tool called Create creator hooks. So creatorhooks.com really cool. Like you put in what the video is about and it does like title and thumbnail suggestions. Got a whole bunch of like psychology and stuff. I use that every day for creating titles and thumbnails because that's like the most important part of YouTube for the concept. I used madness and perplexity a little bit to do kind of like research on other channels in my space. And hey, what have they talked about that like? I haven't basically, you know what we're. What exactly what we're saying. But most of the time I kind of just like, I'm in the space. I was watching a ton of YouTube, YouTube during that time, just like learning. Because that was the hardest part of the whole thing is like every video I did, I had to learn the thing and then go teach it, you know, as opposed to like I could do a hundred days of podcasting so easily because I've been doing it for 10 years. But like, the AI stuff is changing so quickly. It's like, okay, I gotta go learn Perplexity Sonar and I gotta go learn freaking Google's new thing and then I gotta do the video on it. So like, some of it was like just, oh, anthropic 4.5 just dropped. Let's go. Or Claude Skills just dropped and I gotta go learn that thing. So some of that was like pretty easy from the ideation perspective. And then like a lot of it was just pretty automated. Like I had an editor, one of the guys on our team, and I Reused most of the description. Every video I would just write a paragraph about what the video was about. I. I scripted. No, it's not true. I used AI to script maybe 10 of the videos. Like if I wanted to talk on a, an off camera kind of topic or off screen topic. Like I did one on climate change and AI which is like a huge thing. One on like the cost of AI. Like the whole like the actual cost privacy. Like yeah, Manus just wrot the whole script for me. But the rest of it, like yeah, AI just didn't fit in that workflow really well. [00:36:06] Speaker B: What did you learn most from that? From doing those videos? 100 of them in 100 days. You finished now, haven't you? I think I saw you post your. [00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I finished on Monday. Yeah, today. So we're recording on Friday. Published the last one on Monday and then I actually put another one out this week. So like I'm not trying to stick with it. Yeah. What did I learn? I think that like you know, I get a lot of, I get a lot of like grief. Some like some of my friends and stuff. Stuff like oh my gosh, like AI Craig thinks AI is the answer for everything. I learned that it has its lane, it has its application in place where it's really, really, really good and where it's really good. It's so good it's scary. Like I am quite scared of what will happen to us at like a humanity level with AI and jobs. Like 100% like we're going to have mass unemployment. Not because AI is going to like take all of our jobs because like a person can now do two or three times the work as they used to. [00:37:00] Speaker B: It's just 100% companies that do. [00:37:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:02] Speaker B: Do the work. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Yep. So like I'm vibe coding some stuff on the side and like I can just sit here and right now I have a Claude agent going and building a feature as we're talking. I don't need to hire a developer. Like I literally don't need. I probably should hire a developer at some point but like I can get the first version of this thing out the door. That's 20 grand worth of paying a developer that like I just don't have to do. And you multiply that times everybody, everywhere in every business. That that's a very significant uh. And so like I knew that going in. I thought actually AI would be more all encompassing and learned that like that actually is like a really good tool. It's a really, really, really good tool. But. But it's not entirely. Taking anyone's job doesn't answer all. It's just making less jobs necessary. [00:37:43] Speaker B: What about growing on YouTube? Like a lot of people listening to this, There'll be podcasters on your side. There'll be podcasters on my side. How do you. Whether it's actually promoting a, a podcast episode or whether it's like YouTube videos on the side to grow your content. What did you learn? A channel. [00:37:58] Speaker A: So the biggest thing I learned is the, like, the concept is everything. And I knew this, like, I knew this from talking to people and you hear people like Colin and Samir or, you know, whoever, you know, the concept is everything. And if you don't have the concept, then you can't engineer the title and thumbnail, which is this next most important thing. And a couple of times I did that and got it right. And actually most of the time, time I kind of didn't. And you know, if you look at the analytics of the, of the channel, like, I have a couple videos that are like a hundred thousand views and they are, they're awesome. They're both listicles and they're both mass appeal. And so the concept is like, it's like, it's a good concept for everyone. And they're both, you know, around like, how to make money with AI. And then I had a whole bunch that like, I just wanted to do. Like the one I released yesterday was or today was like three things I learned with Claude Code, you know, agents. Like, I just want to do that video, you know, and there's going to be 2, 200 people. There's going to be 200 people that watch that that are really interested. And I think that's the difference with like pod between podcasting and YouTube is like, in a channel, I can make both those videos and they can perform wildly different in podcasting. Like, I'll have 800 people listen to this episode because we're going to simulcast this on my podcast. Colin, if you were amazing, still 800 people would listen to that. If this episode sucks, still 800 people are going to listen to it. And that's the challenge of like growing a podcast versus YouTube channel is on you. You can have a winner and you could maybe only ever have one, but you could get, you know, I grew from 250 to 11,000 subscribers in a hundred days. I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever in the history of this podcast have 11,000 listeners. I know, I know. Because we have, you know, I see the analytics, very popular podcasts in our world that you would be shocked how. How few listeners they have. Yeah, yeah, but we think they're. Oh, that's the podcast in this space or that space. Yeah, we will. As a platform. I bet we don't have a dozen podcasts that have more than a hundred thousand downloads a month. [00:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's scary, isn't it? I think it comes. [00:39:54] Speaker A: We're not the biggest. We're not the biggest. You know, the biggest shows don't come to cast us. They go to Libsyn or whatever. [00:39:59] Speaker B: But the biggest shows are like, it is a total. It's not even an 80, 20 rule or a 90 10. It's like a 991 rule, isn't it? Podcasting Joe Rogan is like 90% of the listenership for the whole of podcasting, practically. I don't know. That's not the number exactly, but it's. It won't be. It'll be something ridiculous like that kind of scale. [00:40:18] Speaker A: And that. That's like all the way back to the very beginning, though, is like, that's fine. It doesn't matter. The 800 people that listen to this podcast, it is extremely valuable. And I will always do this podcast. You know, like, my co host left a few years ago, and I was like, dude, I'm going to keep doing this, because this, it's more. It's way more important to me than it is valuable to anyone else, I think. And I think that's how people should look at it. [00:40:38] Speaker B: And we've seen. I mean, we've seen people making a really good living out of listenership of 50 or 100, because literally they can convert half of those people. You run a two and a half grand a month coaching service and you only convert ten of them, and suddenly that's a great lift for sure. [00:40:51] Speaker A: So. [00:40:51] Speaker B: You're totally right. All right, we're right at the top of the hour, Craig. Should we tie it up there? [00:40:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, thanks, Colin. This is great. [00:40:57] Speaker B: That was great fun. Yeah. So, yeah, go and check out, like, you're over at Kastos, aren't you, Craig? Castos.com so for all your hosting needs and if you want podcast editing, come over to alitude.com as well. Check us out. But yeah, great fun talking always, Craig. So, yeah, cheers. We'll talk to you. [00:41:12] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks, Col. Sam.