Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a lot of people get the impression that as soon as you start something, that's you going for broke, that's you going for the billion dollar exit or at least the life changing 100 million, 10 million, whatever it is, it takes you to get out for retirement. So it's basically the big one, that's the big one for you. It's you're going to sell your business, you're going to grow one business, you're going to sell it and you're set for life. And that's kind of what people expect because they see the stories of, you know, Facebooks and Googles and all that kind of stuff that has been, they've been founded in a garage and suddenly they got to like life changing.
But the vast, vast majority of people that I've met that have sold a business or have done or have built wealth in general have done it bit by bit.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Colin Gray, how's it going?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Pretty cute. Not too bad, not too bad. How are you?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Good, good. Yeah. I think we're both in non homework environment so our podcast set up here is a little different. But I hope that it's. I think the more important thing, especially these days is valuable information and production quality, maybe less important. So the fact that we're both traveling and podcasting is maybe appropriate.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we'll probably get some comments to belie this, but audio engineering has never been as simple as it is these days.
Chuck it through one of the dozens of tools that clean up audio and suddenly your crappy old audio that you'd never have recovered 10 years ago. Sounds pristine. So we'll see how we come.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, for sure. So Colin, you've been on the show twice maybe and I've known you for 10 years since we kind of both got started in this like online business and in the podcasting space. And you're going to be the co host for the foreseeable future. And we're dating I think as co host and kind of see, see how things go.
But I thought we have really good chats. We always say, gosh, we should have recorded this. And so that's what we're doing here.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: The usual. Yeah, I've got this weird relationship with a few friends I consider I've met you a bunch of times in person now, Craig, and we talk fairly often as well about all sorts of things. But then I also have always listened to your podcast as well. So it's like this weird dual relationship where I'm listening in on your other stuff. At the same time as is actually talking to you as well. And I've got this with a few people that I've met through the industry too. And it's. It's really interesting. But yeah, so I feel like simultaneously honored to come on Rogue Startups, the one of my original favorites as well as just. Yeah, good to have a good chat with a pal.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I think like, just to put. Put in context, like where you are. So you were the founder of Alitu and we're going to talk about the. Were part of, I think largely today. So you exited the business somewhat recently.
And I have some questions about like the. The kind of process, both from like a mechanical perspective and like psychological perspective. But then I also think like, one of the things I always try to do on the show is like, try to abstract like specific lessons to like generalizable things for everybody. And I think that question is more like in the state of business and what like M and A looks like today. Like, should you sell your business today?
Should you not? And kind of how you thought about if this was the right opportunity.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah.
It's something I've thought about a lot. I thought about a lot before the sale and I've thought about a fair bit since as well. Like how you actually find that time. And I think we've had a few chats about this over the last few years as well. Just when's the right time? You know, I think there's so much goes into it, isn't there? Like there's the kind of psychological part of which is how much you're enjoying doing it, how much you want to do it for the foreseeable future, whether you are the best person for the business at that time as well. All of those kind of go into your mindset and your current state of mind.
But then there's the industry as well, isn't there? And, well, there's two parts of that as well, isn't there? So three. So the industry, how well the industry's doing, the demand in the industry, how the industry itself is growing. But then the other side is how well the business is doing. So the industry might be doing really well, but your business isn't, or vice versa. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of it, isn't there? There's like mindset, industry and actually company status as well. So I don't know, what do you reckon is the place to jump in?
[00:04:28] Speaker B: I think just to give folks context, like Alitu is a business in the podcasting space does a lot of the same things as Kastos actually. And so I'm happy and proud that we're able to be good buddies, even though we were direct competitors for a fair bit. And I think that's a lesson maybe for everybody. For most people listening to this show, the answer of when you should sell your business was 2021.
But that ship has sailed. And so maybe, I think a question I asked myself is those three questions that you posed. You know the data today, but do you know that you don't know that data relative to what it will be in two years? So even though it's kind of a shit time to sell your business right now, no offense, is it going to be better or worse in a couple of years?
I think that's the third part, but I don't know.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: Yeah, there's obviously so many different ways of looking at this. I think the way I looked at it is, or I would look at it in future as well is I don't think it's possible to find the best time. I think it's like investing. People talk about being able to day trade and so to be able to do something, something like that, to be able to invest and make money on investing consistently, you need to be able to tell better than anyone else when something has at its best price or you need to be very, very good at getting out when at least it has gone up. A decent, significant. I mean that's one approach, isn't it? Like you buy something and as soon as it goes up 15, 20%, you sell. It doesn't matter what's going to happen next.
You might believe it's going to double, it's going to triple, but actually you don't know what it's going to do. So you should sell it when it's up. And I think there's something around that with selling businesses too. Like there's, I don't know, how do you. Well, how would you see it, Craig? Like I, I think there's so much like over the last 15 years like running this thing and meeting so many different business owners, business runners, entrepreneurs.
There's a lot of people get the impression that as soon as you start something that's you going for broke, that's you going for the billion dollar exit or at least the life changing 100 million, 10 million it is, it takes you to get out for retirement. So it's basically the big one. That's the big one for you. It's you're going to sell your business you're going to grow one business, you're going to sell it and you're set for life. And that's kind of what people expect because they see the stories of, you know, Facebooks and Google's and all that kind of stuff that has been, they've been founded in a garage and suddenly they got to like life changing money. But the vast majority of people that I've met that have sold a business or have done or have built wealth in general have done it bit by bit. They've built something to 200k and they've sold it at that and they've used that 200k to build something of half a million and then they've sold that, then they've built something to a million and they sold that and everything gives them more experience but equally it gives them capital as well.
And that kind of stairs, I'm stealing Rob's phrase there, stair stepping approach. There's a different stair stepping approach I whereby it de risks you every time as well. I found that was what I got most anxious about over time was the fact that I built this thing that got to a million pound plus business and I hadn't had anything out of it really, apart from a salary. And so I felt like I need to get something out of this just in case it all goes wrong tomorrow.
And so the stair stepping type approach gets you to that. You get a little bit at a time, you get a little bit of equity out, you get to build the next thing and you learn every time. But I don't know, do you think that's nonsense or do you think that's, do you think that's too safe or is it too wussy to think that way? Should most people actually, if a business is doing well, should you keep going? Sorry, just to give you one last thing before I hand it over there, Craig, the point of that is, I think for the most part the best time to sell a business is in that kind of investing approach where a business is doing really well and actually you do expect it to grow because that is when you're going to get the most for it. It's going to be when it's the easiest to sell.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: So I'm not sure, but obviously it's a risk because you might think it's going to get a lot bigger.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that while it's still growing is the most important to me. Like, you know, if I look at the sellability of my business, like we're not growing, I Don't know a lot of people that are growing right now, you know, and kind of conventional, you know, product led growth, especially SaaS. And so I think that's like one kind of lever we don't have and we had previously is like you could tell the, the story of like hey, product led growth, you know, SEO, content marketing, it, you know, you just do this thing and magically customers appear and buy your stuff. As a customer acquisition channel, that's the thing that's changed the most. And that, that's kind of hard if the business isn't growing, which is kind of the case we're in. I think the math of like selling or not is a little different. And this is just like my experiences. Like we've, we ran like a light M and a process earlier this year and got one offer that was really terrible and that kind of told me like, hey, the market. And this is like probably the 80, 20 of the market. We reached out to a bunch of these roll up kind of companies and some said no, some said not right now. And one said like this is what we would offer because we're not huge. We did about a million and a half last year because we're not growing and we're not massively profitable because like SaaS, like I think the dirty secret of SaaS for folks who are just starting out is like even at a million bucks, there's not a lot of cash left over. Yeah, there's just not like you got to pay developers and we pay, you probably did too. 15 plus percent of our revenue to AWS and Cloudflare and all this kind of stuff. And then like I need to get paid and you know, we have taxes and all this kind of crap. Like there's just not a lot of money left over.
And so I think these, like you said, the growth or the cash flow story, you need to be able to tell one or the other to these acquirers is not for us, at least not amazing. And so I think that's kind of where we are in this math is it probably makes more sense for us to keep the company for now to your point of stair stepping to extract kind of what wealth we can from it, which is like me paying myself a nice salary. There's not a whole bunch of extra money for me to, I'm not making a whole ton of money from it. But I do agree that to your original point, sometimes maybe you get lucky and the first thing you do is the moonshot and you sell Instagram to Facebook for a billion Dollars and you made it in a weekend that just never happens, basically.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: So rare.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah. But even you, you stairstepped, right? Like you did the podcast host and then Alitoo and you probably had some things in there too, like within the one business unit you stair stepped, kind of like we did with podcast.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I didn't sell anything along the way. But you're right, it was stairstepped in terms of capability. Yeah, for sure. Did the content, which developed the audience, that was with a tiny team, just me and then me and Matthew and we built it to a reasonably profitable space there, like up to maybe a quarter of a million a year. And then from there we had enough money coming in, like profit to be able to commit to building some software and an audience to actually ask as well. Like, I think that was one of the important parts was developing an audience that could guide us on what they actually wanted in a piece of software too. You're right. Yeah. So it was like it was making that money. So we didn't have to take funding, didn't have to give away a bunch of equity, all of that kind of stuff that made it much more possible, for sure.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: That's similar.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Because we did a similar thing with like, had a bit. Had a content engine running like through podcast Motor, and then acquired our WordPress plugin for Castos to like acquire a customer acquisition channel. That's so underrated to have that before you start with SaaS, because, like the cold start SaaS problem is, is massive. Like, we see it all the time. It's so hard.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, I know it's kind of easy. Easier said than done. It's kind of how we started out, I guess, isn't it, Craig? But it's. And it takes a while, that's the trouble. Content takes a while to develop an audience, but it takes a while to develop a bit of software as well and to get it out to market. Even these days, it still takes a while to get it commercialized. Might not take you that long to build it now, but to properly commercialize it, it does. And by that point you might have built the wrong thing because you've not had an audience to actually validate it with and ask what they want and all that kind of stuff. So. Yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah. It was funny you mentioned there about the sales process and the fact that I think I could have kept going. We had plans, so with our team, we had plans around how we get it. We were in a similar situation, we weren't growing very fast.
We weren't very profitable. I think you're absolutely spot on there. Like our scale of SaaS, where you're in the half a million to 1 million to maybe even 2 million range, there's not a lot of profit left over because you need this kind of minimalist. You need a minimum team to run it, don't you? Minimum team and minimum resource. You haven't hit economies of scale by that point yet. I think once you reach like 3 or 4 million, going by the kind of people I've talked to, that's when profit starts to actually come in. But then most people just start chucking it back into more resource anyway. But we hadn't hit that either. So we had plans to try and get into a better position so that it could have been worth more and we could have sold it for more, but I had lost the appetite. I'll be honest. I think that's the other part, the mindset. I started this thing in 2010, and as much as I love podcasting, I've been talking about podcasting for 15 years, and I'll still try and convert people into listening to podcasts. I still listen to podcasts. I still make podcasts for other spaces now. So it's not like I've fallen out of love with it. But there's a point as well. I think that it doesn't matter how much you could grow it more, if it's just not very excited doing it, very happy doing it, or even there's just other things you want to do. I think that was a big thing for me. There was a few other things I was just getting really interested in that I was missing the opportunity to work on. And that was why. I think that was one of the big reasons why I sold the company at that point. Even though it probably wasn't the best time to sell, it certainly wasn't the best time to sell. Historically, it might not be the best time to sell in future, but I'm still happy we did it at the time we did.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I want to ask about, like, you know, kind of like, I'll say, falling out of love with the business because, yeah, 15 years, a long time. I think we're 12 years in. We're 13 years in all. All said, like, for me, there's. There's aspects of the business that I definitely don't love anymore. There's aspects to it that I really do love. And like, you and I were chatting on WhatsApp the other day, and, like, The. The part I love the most is our team. I love our team. I love the. I love all of our team. I love how we work.
I love the freedom it affords me to be up at my daughter's volleyball camp this week and able to, like, work remotely and largely kind of own my time, I guess I don't love the problem we solve these days, which is kind of like what you're talking about, which is like, podcasting. It's a tough market. It's not growing, it's hyper competitive. Everything's competitive these days. But, yeah, I guess that's kind of like where I am is like, the problem of podcasting is not the thing that gets me out of bed every morning.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a funny industry as well, in that the problem that we set out to solve is no longer the problem most people see. So, like, so many people coming into podcasting now, podcasting isn't audio only. Podcasting is video and audio.
And it's maybe not even podcast hosted. Like, you know, it's hosted on YouTube or Spotify and. Or Spotify, and they don't even have an RSS feed anymore. And I'm not here to argue with that. I'm not one of the purists that say it's only a podcast if it's RSS feed or anything like that. I think that's a bit over the top.
But it's a different problem now, isn't it? Like, I think I was still quite excited about some aspects of Alitud because it was. I think we were in a position, and the people that took over still are. I think it's got a really good chance of riding that wave because it has become video first now. And it's also. It's built in a way that I think really suits that type of medium too. So I think it's. I think it just changed a lot, didn't it? Is that. Did you. Is that how you felt about it? Like, it. It was just different than when we got into it, I think.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: Yeah. The thing that is most frustrating to me, and again, this is. This is in the context of, like, kind of the life cycle from an emotional perspective as a founder is I always think, like, we have all these jobs to do, and I just hate the word jobs to be done. I hate the term. But, like, as a founder, like, I have this challenge, and I want to achieve this challenge. Then I want to achieve this other challenge. I want to achieve this other challenge. Kind of done several of those, like, raised some money we kind of grew to like a reasonable size. The challenge we have right now is really hard.
Maybe that's why I don't like it as much. But it's like, first you launch this thing and then you do, and then you get to a point. And at this point, it's like, our challenge now is basically like, how can we eke out 5% gain via SEO to get more trials? And in a business that's in a market that's not growing, we need to steal from our competitors, essentially.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: And so, like, if I look at like, what job do I need to do in the business that that's not like the, the thing that it psychs me. I. I think one lesson to your earlier comment about like the stair step is like, I'm very much like a zero to one kind of person.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah, that's exactly what I identify with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And once it's down to optimization, once it's down to growing perfect, you know, team structures and processes and all that kind of stuff. You know, I enjoy doing that for myself, but I. It does not excite me at all, the idea of building that for like spending five years growing a team around that. Like, I actually, it really quite interests me going into like a bigger company and saying, and given like analyzing it and spending a month really digging into it and giving them a report, but I don't want to implement it. Does that make sense? Like, I actually, I do love process, workflow, that kind of thing. I love the idea of designing a team, designing a company. That's the bits that I really enjoyed. But then actually the grind of the yearly thing of having to put that into action because it takes so long once you're a bigger team. That's. Yeah, that doesn't get me going at all.
But how. Well, how do you. How do you. How do you balance that with what you will do then? Do you have.
Do you kind of break up your days so that you're doing some of the work that you don't enjoy, but mixed up with some of the stuff you do enjoy at the moment? How are you sort of planning?
[00:19:13] Speaker B: I do, I do. I heard it said really well the other day that you need to spanx your calendar.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: So, you know, you know, spanx the, like. Yeah, you get your pants on under undergarment.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: You need to confine and control your time because otherwise, like, and I think, like, you know, Castos, like, I have a lot of responsibility to other people. You know, my inbox is legit like, I have people to pay and response, you know, custom. Some customers email me and like, I have to be involved in the business to an extent at this point. And we have a relatively robust team, I think, for like, where we are and what we're doing. I don't have to be involved day to day putting in 40 hours a week for the business to do what it's doing, and I haven't for a while now. I think the danger to your point is if I don't spanx my time, it just bleeds over to kind of all available time.
And so what I've tried to do really just in the last couple of months is box it as much as I can to, like, I go all day, super hard, a couple of days a week on Casto stuff. And currently those are like Mondays and Thursdays because we have team meetings then and I can get all of the real kind of proactive work done that I need done in that time. And then it's just a bit here and there with like a check email and I respond to Slack a couple times a day. And then it's the rest of my stuff, like recording this podcast and doing YouTube and my kind of AI consulting and stuff like that.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: But I do think that, like, as you get to this point of maturity in your business, the business can consume all of your time. And that's just like a. It's like, to me, it's like an economics kind of question of, like, if the business is growing and there's a ton of potential, then all of my time definitely should be put into that. If it's not, and the business is pretty mature and it's kind of doing its thing, and I hate to say it, but the opportunity kind of just isn't there. It's not going to be a $10 million business. Then I owe it to myself and my family to allocate some of my time somewhere else. And I just wanted to be really smart about how I do that. You brought up an interesting point that I've thought of recently, and I'd be super interested to hear your perspective on it is getting a job.
Yeah, I think. I think having a job could be really interesting right now, especially like, in. In the age of AI. Like, I think, like, I have a friend who is like head of AI at a huge real estate company, and I think something like that could be really interesting. There's not a lot of jobs I would take, but something like that would be. Would be pretty interesting if I was in a Different kind of place.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: Would you ever have a job?
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I would be. I don't think I would end up like 5, 10 years in another company. But then who knows? I don't know. But I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. Like a job like that where it was like one, two years, you just think this company, I'm going to go in there with one particular goal that might take me one, two, maybe even three years.
Something really interesting, like. Yeah, absolutely. Like building out what does AI infrastructure look like for an AI first real estate company or anything else. Or even like, I still love content and I spent so much time working with content creators, working on stuff for podcasters, working teaching podcasters, all that kind of stuff. I love the idea of actually trying to apply that to an industry that's not more traditionally that way inclined, something that, like an industry that's much less competition around content, or go and be a sort of head of content or a content strategist for somebody that I think could make a big impact in that way as well. So I think there's a few things. It would have to be a really specific thing, but yeah, there's certain jobs I would do maybe three days a week kind of thing and still be able to mess around my own stuff the other two days. Yeah, possibly.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Without like divulging the exact kind of financials, like you said yourself, this is kind of a stair step, you know, exit. Yep, exit for you. So to me that means like you'll need to work again at some point. How do you think about that? Like you had a win, you're taking some time off. Maybe now.
How are you going to the financials?
Okay, yeah, tell me more about that.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: I've had some trouble with this. Yeah, for sure. Like it's. Yeah, exactly. So I think we got a really good outcome for the company.
Various good things like for the staff, all that kind of stuff for the most part. But yeah, absolutely. It's not like retirement forever money, but it's plenty to help me start something else and to give me some time to think about what's next.
And for the first two months it was mainly transition, so it was helping them take over the company. So I was out pretty quick, which is unusual in a acquisition as well, I think. But yeah, for the first two months it was me kind of working full time to pass it over. But as soon as it hit the end of that, it was March, April, so this first of May, basically I was kind of out of my full time work with that.
And that was it. It was like we actually handed it over pretty successfully. Like we got through it all. I think we did it in a really efficient way.
And I sat down that Monday morning, I was like, what did I do now? No idea.
It was weird. But for the next week or two, I just walked upstairs to my office, I sat down in front of the computer, I started working on some stuff and I started getting really anxious by like 11am like I wasn't being productive enough, I wasn't getting enough done. I was, I wasn't making any money yet. Like I hadn't done enough things. That was like working towards a new business again or client work or what ever. And I suddenly realized I need to. This is just completely pointless. There's absolutely no benefit in me treating myself that way. I need to actually give myself some reward.
So I kind of started to slow down a bit and I set myself the goal that I would just take the summer and try and be as lazy as possible and spend time with the kids. My kids are kind of getting older as well, so it's great to have a summer to be able to spend more time with them as well. So that was what I did. I said, deadline, end of August. So I've got till 1st of September and then I'm allowed to start stressing out about it, start September.
But from there I've set out other milestones. So I've decided I don't need to make any money for the next six months beyond that. So September to something like February is like foundations, just building foundations of what I want to do next. Giving myself time to experiment, to build, to talk to possible customers, clients, if it's consulting, building little things to test whether they're valid businesses, that kind of thing.
But then from, from February I need to start making a living again because that'll be a year from the sale as well.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Right. I was gonna say. So that's the timeline.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: And so like, I'll just. You don't have to answer, but I'll just kind of talk through how I would maybe think about it. It's like that's the money you spent from like, you know, not having salary is, is a portion of, of like what you brought home from the sale.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: And I guess you just have to feel good about what that. That proportion is. Like that's half or it's 10% or it's 1% or whatever it is. And you kind of squared with that being okay.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's it Exactly. Yeah. I've kind of figured out, like, how much it'll cost me to live for those 12 months if I make nothing between now and then. I'm lucky enough that I do have a bit of coaching income during that time, so I still do some coaching with a few clients and I really enjoy that as well. It's good fun doing that. So that's really nice that that kind of covers all you, the bills, all that kind of stuff.
I'm going to do some teaching with a couple of support programs that they run over here. The Scottish government helps support as well. So helping some startup founders get started, essentially, which I think is really good fun. So I'm looking forward to that as well. I've done a little bit of that already. I'm going to do more of that in the next six months. But, yeah, basically that kind of helps it. And my worst case scenario, though, is I've worked out exactly how much I need for that year and I've decided, yes, that's okay. I'm fine, even if I have to spend that. That's all right.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. That's nice. I guess it's impossible to tell, but, like, you know, stuff in the news this week has been like, oh, the SaaS or the jobs apocalypses is not proving true as much as people thought. Even though I see huge unemployment numbers coming out, you know, 140,000 or something from tech firms. But like, you know, the SaaS job or the jobs apocalypse, especially in tech, is not proven out as much as people thought. How do you look at where we are as SaaS in the kind of value life cycle? Like, you know, five years ago was the best time. It's not as good a time.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: How do you.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: How do. As you were evaluating to sell the business, you were like, now is a good time because, like, you got an offer and the business was at, like a stable kind of reasonable point and you had some math around the industry.
So podcasting and SaaS in general, we'll just put those together.
How did you think about evaluating where that was in terms of it's going to get better or worse?
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been reading some of the same chat. It's not going to be as bad, the SaaS apocalypse and everything.
I think there is a big element to that. I think there is so much that it's been said many times over, but I'll repeat it. There's so much more to running a SaaS than just the software, than building the software. Than just coding.
There's even more to it than just customer service. Like other elements that AI might be able to take over a lot of. But there's so much more to it that just one person on their own could potentially run a SaaS. But I think it'd be so, so hard.
I think the only people that potentially could run a SaaS by themselves are people like us that have done it. I don't think there are random people in the world are going to like an estate agent is going to just start up an estate agent SaaS or a lawyer is going to start up a lawyer SaaS and just do it by themselves. I think they need product people, they need customer service, they need all these people that actually know how to do all that stuff. Well, yes, they could ask AI, like how do I run a customer services team? But it's a different thing from being able to actually run it well with oversight, you know, to give that kind of, to supervise that kind of thing. So I think that's a big part of it, of why it's not going to be quite as doom and gloom as, as everyone says. The trouble is we were SaaS. And content.
And content is the other utterly threatened piece as well. I actually think.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in a second as well. But I actually think content is not going to suffer as much as a lot of people have said in the past as well. I think both SaaS and content will take a hit. I think certainly there'll be more competition for SaaS. There'll be way more competition for content. But I think people will still look out the authentic stuff and I think AI will still have real trouble competing with a certain type of podcast, a vast majority of podcasts, which is conversations like this, the kind of newsy based, informational based. Yeah, but I mean, do you think that.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think when you look at content, I think there's a few buckets you could put it in. One is like written web based content. I think that's very challenging what we're doing here. And I'll put other YouTube in that bucket is by far the best place to put your time and money right now. Mostly because like I think the risk is that the other bucket, which is like conventional social media is so easy to fake with AI written content and like even some video, like My most recent YouTube video is about like, you know, generative video. And it's not perfect, but it's really good. And so I think anytime that's the case, then the amount of competition increases and the ability to perform and stand out there goes down. But very few people can have this conversation. And so I think that's why it's valuable.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: I think pure how to content is basically dead written is utterly dead. Like just a five step guide to changing your car tire, a ten step guide to getting your will done, whatever it might be. That kind of content, which used to work an absolute treat 10 years ago when we were doing it dead video, I think I don't know where do you see YouTube on that the moment? Like I feel like even how to video is going to be a real struggle in the next few years for two reasons, I suppose. One is people just go to ChatGPT and ask like how do I change a car tire? And it'll give them pictures and stuff like that might even generate them video. The other is that maybe the car tire one isn't the best example of this is. But I'm doing a lot of AI video summarizations right now on YouTube for how to content. Like if it says here's how to or here's the best way to set up your Hermes agent right now, I'll look at that video and I'll go 15 minutes or I'll just hit summarize this video and I'll just read through the summary and 9 out of 10, I'll just use that rather than watch it. I don't know, what do you think about YouTube's prospects there?
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So I guess I'll speak to it from two perspectives. Like from the Kastos perspective, we, we did quite a bit of YouTube. It was always pretty hard to perform really well I think because even going back a few years, like the how to podcasting content is like relatively solved. Like it's just technically not that hard to do a podcast. That's the artistic side of it. That's really hard and that like there's no good content around that.
There's no usefulness for content around that. I would say we are just starting to do YouTube content again at Kastos and the entire goal of it is to seed the models so to have a bigger SEO footprint under the Kastos brand. So we own the channel and we can publish content about the things that we want to associate our brand with. That's the only reason we're doing it. It will be helpful too. But like they are very SEO optimized. And I don't mean well, I don't mean like people search for a term and watch Our video. I mean like the models are ingesting all the videos on YouTube and they're, you know, it's a cited source in, in like in all these kind of AI visibility tools. For me personally around like my AI and coaching business, it's just the best combination of like discovery and trust that there is.
It's, it's amazing. I mean I have leads every week from my YouTube channel and several clients coming from it. And like one very, very, very big customer client that like watched a couple of my YouTube videos, reached out and now we're doing like a quite large engagement for like fractional head of AI with $2 billion business all from YouTube and like one sales call.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Wow. See you're doing, I would argue a lot of your. Because I've seen a lot of your YouTube videos and you're doing a great job there. A lot of them are not necessarily pure how to either though, aren't they? There a lot of it. You're doing quite a lot of more not discovery. Well, I suppose it is like kind of news. I suppose like here's what's happening with the new Hermes version or here's, you know, seven things you can do with openclaw, that kind of thing. It's more like, you know, giving people it's interesting content. It's not just how to do this step by step. It's kind of, it's interesting, fun stuff for people that are really enthused about this topic, which I think is the kind of thing that people will actually watch bit by bit. Yeah, I don't know.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I've struggled with the strategy here a lot and I'll. I'd love to get your perspective on kind of where I've landed.
For a long time it was very broad and the goal was just to get views and subscribers and then kind of had a crisis of like what is the business outcome I want to hope to achieve from this content? If all of the videos are, you know, watch me build a AI stock trading bot with Hermes.
What business outcome can I hope to achieve with that? And I think the. Well, and this is where I think the biggest thing is. YouTube is a different type of content channel than web based content.
And it's kind of like social media in this respect that like the current strategy that I have now is as wide and as mass appeal as possible with the option for people to then watch the more targeted videos from there.
Okay, so this is kind of the strategy and I've heard this from several people, but like I'm Gonna record a video later today about the jobs apocalypse not coming true.
That's like a really wide video. Everyone basically would want to watch that. And then I'll mention, hey, if you want help understanding how your company can navigate like the AI landscape, you know, I work with a few clients and then I'll have a link to a video in the description where. And I'll mention this in the video like, hey, if you want to watch, you know how I think about this, watch this video in the description. And then out of, you know, hundreds or thousands of people, some people will do that and kind of enter the invisible funnel. But that's how I think about it. Like I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to create a lot of that targeted content. You probably only need a couple of those pieces and then just like reference them from the really wide pieces. And that's kind of how the platform native funnel can work.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's how you get people to that specific how to. It's how you find people who actually who are willing to watch.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: They sell selection 20 minutes of that because they've enjoyed your more news based, your more discovery or entertainment type based content and then yeah, they've slept it in. Yeah, that's interesting. Are you finding those types of videos easy enough to ideate, like to come up with ideas for those kind of more general ones, but still, because I was going to say still are relevant enough to your channel for YouTube to push it? Because that's kind of the, that's the legend, isn't it, that YouTube. If you change the topic, they won't push those videos. Like are you finding that you're keeping them relevant?
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I've definitely run up against this. Like I think if I had to say what YouTube believes my channel is about is it's a AI news and product review channel.
[00:37:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Is like how I would say that YouTube sees me and I've had, I've had several, like I just wanted to do several videos about marketing and being a founder and running a team. And they do terribly. They do terribly.
And so I think that like I just have to look at like maybe it's a slow transition over time to slowly introduce some of these other topics and start to like expand what YouTube knows about me. But I'm also only at like 23,000 subscribers. And so like probably like what I would tell someone is the smartest thing is just to get to like a hundred thousand subscribers and then I can get you know, cute and fancy. But I Probably just need to suck it up and do what YouTube is telling me to do for a while.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: Totally take its direction. Yeah, there is a bet.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Because it's a great. It's a great platform, you know.
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, there is a bit of, I mean, AI content is going to do better just now anyway because there's so much more eyeballs on it, you know, so much more hypey. Like, I mean, for our YouTube channel, for the podcast host, I used to create a video for that every week or so.
And some would do quite well, some would not do so well, but they'd never be in the tens of thousands of viewers because the market is just not as big. It's like, it's just. There's not as many eyeballs on it. So there's probably something around that too. Like you put an AI video and it can get 50k views because there's so many people searching that stuff. But just general startup marketing, perhaps not.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good, it's a good meta example for the business in general. You know, podcasting through Covid was super hot. Right. Going up massively now. Like it's not. And I think that, you know, to your point of like being a little bit nimble in the business, like, hey, it's a stair step thing like this. I'm not married to this thing forever.
I think many of us are too married to our business forever.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: Yeah, you have your identity tied to it and everything.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: And now it's different. When you have investors, we have investors and I owe it to investors and Rob Walling and Tiny Seed plus other investors. I definitely owe them to do what I can to make the business perform. But if you're bootstrapped, I think maybe that's where the math changes. Like if you're bootstrapped and you're in kind of a average market that's not growing and it's so difficult to grow a SaaS right now. I think you should just be really honest with yourself and say, like, hey, are my 40 hours a week better spent somewhere else?
[00:39:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, we're talking about the fact that we were SaaS and content. So content both are quite under threat spaces at the moment. But I think actually, I mean, I believe podcasts casting is one of the least under threat parts of content. Like I said, like we've already said, the conversational element is really hard to replicate. But equally the video side as well, that ties into then YouTube. YouTube growing really fast. Those longer conversations quite nicely produced with different camera Angles, all that kind of stuff. I think, again, I said earlier on, I believe I left Alitu in a pretty good state to grow from where it can. That wasn't necessarily why I got out, because I think Allitou can really grow. I think it's really well placed to capitalize on the video side of podcasting and really be one of the best places to produce that stuff. But it's partly the fact that a lot of our customers in the past have come from written content. Like our biggest lead channel was how to podcast. It was like how to start a podcast, choose the best podcast, microphones, how to record audio, how to edit audio, all that kind of stuff.
And that just. That's the part that's under threat. It's actually the stats back in February when I sold were still slowly going down, but there was never the massive drop that I always feared would come along. And actually they're relatively steady. So it hasn't dropped off as much as I feared it might, but it's definitely still a bit under threat.
So it needed somebody to come in as requirers that have other skills, like paid acquisition, like partner deals, all that kind of stuff that can grow the company in different ways. I think that was part of my thinking there too. I don't know. How do you think about it that way? Do you still rely a lot? I mean, we've always been both kind of quite heavy on the SEO, haven't we? But are you looking at a lot of different methods now?
[00:41:42] Speaker B: No. Yeah. Like, SEO is our only bet right now. We've done paid and hired a fantastic agency. If anybody wants, like a recommendation for a really good SEO agency, it's called Working Planet. They're actually in Providence where I live. Amazing. Emma there, you know, handled our account and they were incredibly good. And we just couldn't make it work at, like, the dollars that we, you know, need. Like, our average revenue per user is $29 a month. Probably yours was kind of something similar, but our lifetime value is like a thousand bucks. So we get paid back over an incredibly long period of time, which is terrible for paid acquisition. So, like, paid couldn't make it work. SEO and content is kind of like the thing that we have to hang our head on at this point, which is the problem with a lower price point SaaS. It's like your options to acquire customers is so limited.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: I think there's so much in the partner deal type, the brand deal, the influencer marketing, the. What do they call it? Gdc? No, C Creator, ugc. Content. Yeah, that's the one. UGC content.
I think that's a big avenue as well, which I just never had the nerve or the personality to be able to do it because I think there's so much like you just have to go out there and meet so many people and talk to so many people and be a salesman basically.
And I think that's a place where I think obviously Castos would place to do it as well, but Alitu is as well to go forward that way. I think there's other ways. But yeah, certainly that's another kind of aspect to selling is when you know there's a growth opportunity there, but it's just not something you're particularly skilled at, which many things I'm not skilled at. And that's one of them.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean it's great to kind of hear some of the exit story. I'd love to hear folks thoughts like if you're on YouTube, like leave a comment below. If you're on podcasting apps like find Colin and or I on socials and drop your comments about what you want to hear more of or less of around Colin's exit and just our conversations in general. I think we have have handfuls of topics we want to cover. Some of them will be kind of evergreen, some will be kind of current, like what we're working on right now a lot probably around marketing and like running a business because that's our jam. Yeah. Colin, anything else you want to chat through?
[00:44:02] Speaker A: No, I'm just really. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff I'm excited to talk to. We've kind of done a couple of maybe looking back in history episodes here, but once we start getting into the what are we working on now and doing a bit more update of like what's working for us, what's not. There's so much I'm kind of playing around with and building right now, which is great fun. As much as I said I'm trying to be lazy and not do much.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: Yeah. You have a few weeks before you can really start doing that. Right. Converting videos.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: Yeah. But it's like. Yeah, it's good fun anyway. And also one of the things I thought maybe we'd have time for today I was going to ask you about was that chat that we had around very briefly around solo or team?
Because I had the same kind of dichotomy, I suppose, whereby I absolutely loved building a team and working with people and curating people and helping them get better and having kind of complementary skills and that feeling of momentum and all that kind of stuff. But equally, there's no question that in business, some of the worst problems are team problems.
There's definite ups and downs. So that'd be great to talk through as well because definitely someone I'd be thinking about, like, what next? If I was starting something new, I feel like I'd be looking for a co founder doing that and I'd be really wary of doing it myself again. So, yeah, I'd love to dig into that in the next few weeks as well.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds good. I think it's an interesting question. Both of us are solo non technical founders, so I think that's a challenge limitation. Maybe not. Maybe it's a superpower, I don't know. But yeah, it's definitely something.
I think being a solo founder is super lonely. At the same time, having a founder is like a, A serious relationship. And so I think something that like you and I never having have had those would, would go into like intentionally, you know.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I know.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm sure if we had this talk with somebody with a few different co founder businesses, they'd probably want to. It's always. Grass is always greener, isn't it? They'd be like, oh, I would have loved to do that by myself. Just like dictatorially. Just do this and that and this and never have to ask anyone about
[00:46:06] Speaker B: it and yeah, sure, for sure.
We'll leave that as a cliffhanger. We'll talk about that in the next episode. Next time, if you're not already, please subscribe. So you make sure you get that episode as soon as it comes out. Colin, super fun. Thanks for hopping on and being co host extraordinaire.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: Indeed. All right, talk to you soon. Craig.
