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Beyond the Mic: How Zencastr is Changing the Podcasting Game for Creators
166 Plays8 months ago
Podcast Summary:
Title: The Evolution of Podcasting: A Deep Dive with Zencastr's CEO Josh Nielsen
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans talks with Zencastr's CEO, Josh Nielsen, about the dynamic world of podcasting.
Josh shares his journey from a software engineer with a passion for the startup ecosystem to founding Zencastr, a platform that revolutionizes podcast recording, editing, and hosting.
He discusses podcasters' challenges with traditional recording methods and how Zencastr addressed these issues by leveraging browser capabilities for high-quality audio capture.
Josh reflects on the podcast industry's evolution, highlighting the impact of major events like Serial and the COVID-19 pandemic on podcast popularity and creator growth.
He emphasizes the untapped potential in podcasting, citing the low creator-to-consumer ratio compared to other social platforms and the role of AI in reducing production barriers and enhancing content discovery.
Josh touches on Zencastr's commitment to supporting the podcast community through advanced editing tools, education, and fostering connections within the ecosystem.
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Transcript
Personal Podcasting Journey
00:00:09
Speaker
About five years ago, I worked with a consultant, Julie Zuzek, who was totally into podcasting. She loved doing them and encouraged me to start a podcast. I bought to the time because it seemed like there's a lot of work preparing for interviews, conducting the interviews, editing the podcast, and then promoting them. It was overwhelming.
00:00:32
Speaker
But as the barriers to entry disappeared, I jumped on the podcast bandwagon. To be honest, it's one of the best professional decisions that I've ever made. The ability to reach out to smart people and get them to answer questions for 30 to 40 minutes is amazing. It's like free consulting and great material to create content. It goes without saying that I'm a huge advocate for podcasting.
Introducing Josh Nielsen and Zencaster
00:00:59
Speaker
On today's podcast, I'm excited to talk to one of the key players in the podcast industry, Josh Nielsen, who is the co-founder and CEO of Zencaster, a platform for recording, editing and hosting podcasts. And as a disclaimer, I've been a Zencaster customer for three years and have been impressed with its customer service and platform. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Josh. Hey, everybody. Hey, Mark. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the invite.
00:01:23
Speaker
Let's start the interview with the Zencaster 101. Tell me about the history of the company, what you were doing before Zencaster and what prompted you to jump on the Pontas bandwagon. I started my career as a software engineer very quickly out of university, got into startup companies and really developed a
00:01:44
Speaker
A passion for that space is exciting. I wanted to do something like that myself someday. I ended up going to working for a few startups and then I ended up joining up with the Techstars Boulder community and got hired there as a developer in residence to help their companies get their products ready for demo day.
The Evolution of Zencaster
00:02:03
Speaker
Really learned a lot more about
00:02:06
Speaker
Just the startup ecosystem, got to know a lot of founders, a lot of investors and mentors and just a really fun community there in Boulder and tech stars thing. After I left that, then I went to, I decided to start a company called, excuse me.
00:02:25
Speaker
I'm recovering. I'm good, but I might. No worries. Okay. Decided to try my hand at starting my own business. Started a company with a couple of friends of mine called Soundkeep. And the idea was to help electronic, we were all musicians and just had, we were following our passions, I guess you could say, learned later on that that's a very common starting and ending point for companies. And, but had a lot of fun. We were trying to help electronic musicians collaborate together online, swap files and create music together.
00:02:56
Speaker
Didn't end up working out in the end, but I learned a lot about the capabilities that browsers had around working with audio and that these were increasing month by month. They were shipping a lot of new stuff. They'll let you get access to the microphone and pipe the audio around, save it and store it. As I was out pitching that company, somebody said, I don't know about musicians, but podcasters have this problem getting their audio files back and forth or something.
00:03:23
Speaker
I knew about podcasts, I was interested in them, but we were already on, we had a one track mind and we just put that idea on the
Podcast Industry Trends and Technological Impact
00:03:30
Speaker
side. And it wasn't until later after that, that whole company went by the wayside that I came back to that idea and was like, Hey notes, maybe I can use the skills that I learned these new features that are launching in the browsers and build something
00:03:44
Speaker
towards that podcasting idea. So I went and interviewed a lot of podcasters. At the time, they were all using Skype. And they recorded a Skype call, especially back then with the way bandwidth was. It was almost always going to be poor quality. At best, it was highly compressed. At worst, it was dropouts, robotic sounds. And you could actually see this on Twitter when these guys would ship an episode.
00:04:07
Speaker
that their audience would attack them. Oh, this is horrible. I can't listen to this. Like you sound fine, but your guest sounds horrible and it's messing with my head. And as a podcast, that's the exact opposite response you want from watching an episode. You want to grow your audience, not have people saying they're going to unsubscribe. It was a pretty major need in the market for a solution to that.
00:04:29
Speaker
And I was able to cobble something together in about six months. I thought it would take me like six weeks, but you know how that goes. And launched an MVP and it really met that need and hit product market fit out of the gate and grew from there. And we got our first customers by going onto Twitter and saying, Hey, we see you're having problems with the audio. We solved it. Come check it out. So that was the impetus and the MVP launch.
00:04:59
Speaker
I'm curious to get your take on the state of the podcast industry right now compared to five years ago. It's come an awful long way. Podcasts are clearly a part of the marketing landscape and they're growing by leaps and bounds and lots of companies are starting podcasts. Many of those podcasts don't last very long. If truth be told.
00:05:24
Speaker
Where do you think the podcast industry is right now economically, both in terms of how it's being embraced by companies as a sales and marketing tool? What do you see as some of the things that you're excited about? And conversely, what do you see as the challenges for the podcast industry going forward? The idea started like 10 years ago, and I think we launched the actual
00:05:47
Speaker
So we've seen a lot of that history. When I started working on this, podcasting was not a hot market or an interesting space for a venture funded company. And that also wasn't the goal in the beginning. That was fine. But as I was building it, then some events happened like Serial, This American Life, started getting millions of downloads per episode.
00:06:10
Speaker
That just ushered in a whole new wave of interest into the space when people saw, hey, you can really do something big and successful with podcasts and make an impact and make a lot of money potentially. That was one major shift that I wasn't expecting and really just we got caught on. I wouldn't say we caught the wave. I think the wave caught us, but that was a big boon to the ecosystem.
00:06:33
Speaker
Now I think we're definitely seeing the space is maturing. I do not think it's mature. I do not think I've even seen the nearly the end of the interest in podcasting and podcast creation. We got a big bump over COVID and some of that has tapered off, but the longer term growth trend is still pretty strong.
00:06:53
Speaker
One of the reasons why I think that there's still so much room left in this market because a lot of people say, Oh, I missed the, I missed it. It's too late to start a podcast now or whatever. If you look at the ratio of consumers to creators in the podcasting space versus that ratio on Twitter or that ratio on Instagram or Tik TOK wildly different. I think X and.
00:07:20
Speaker
TikTok have creator to consumer ratios in like the 30 to 40% or something like that. Double digit numbers and podcasting has like well under 1% of creators to consumers. And why is that? As you already alluded to, it's a lot easier to make a tweet than it is to make a podcast. There's a lot of people just hitting those barriers to entry, even though they have an idea for podcasts, want to do it.
00:07:47
Speaker
As you mentioned, then they try and they even burn out because they realize how much work is involved. That's a big part of our effort from the very beginning is we need to make this totally frictionless as easy as possible. And there's still a lot of room left. We've done a lot of that work to make it easier, but there's still a lot of room left to make it way easier.
Zencaster's User-Centric Strategy
00:08:08
Speaker
And I think
00:08:09
Speaker
AI is definitely coming in and lifting some of that weight. It's already happening in the space, the AI impact, and that's going to continue to continue to grow. I'm glad you mentioned AI. I want to look at the impact of that technology along with machine learning and the flurry of podcast services that have emerged around editing and sound quality and arranging interviews and recording interviews.
00:08:39
Speaker
How much of an impact that had so far on the industry? It feels like we're in the beginning stages where people are playing with AI, but they may not be leveraging in a wonderful or amazing ways. And at the same time, what is Zen Catcher's approach to AI and machine learning when it comes to improving the platform?
00:08:58
Speaker
We've already seen a major impact with AI. You're seeing all the major players, including ourselves, are picking this up. We've had a machine learning team for two or three years already because we've had a need for a long time to cost effectively transcribe the content accurately and then open up the content so that it can be searchable and findable on search engines and that sort of thing.
00:09:22
Speaker
We've just launched several months ago, an AI powered clipping tool, where it takes the transcript and we say, find us the funniest part of this content for the TikTok audience or find us the most interesting part of this show for
00:09:40
Speaker
dentists or whatever the content is with a 30 40 minute recording you can expect to get maybe like 20 clips out of that that's gonna be able to power your social media just from that one episode you can post daily every weekday for a month off of that if you're doing four episodes a week and this ties back into
00:10:00
Speaker
One of the real big problems outside in podcasting, probably the biggest problem outside of the barriers of entry for creation is a ton of work to even get to that point. Podcasting doesn't have a built-in growth algorithm. Like it would be if you posted a tweet or a TikTok, it will go out and find other people on the platform who they think are going to be an audience for you and show it to them. Podcasting that doesn't happen inherently. So you have to figure out how do I.
00:10:29
Speaker
take my content, format it in the right format for each of these different platforms that do have these growth algorithms, and then get them on there. Helping people find and grow the audience, AI and that clipping tool is a really big part of that. And the goal is to solve really the biggest problem in podcasting was how do I find my audience? How do I grow my audience and potentially then monetize, but the growth has to come first.
00:10:54
Speaker
Aside from the mechanics of podcasting, showing people how easy it is to record podcasts, what is Encaster doing to support the success of the podcast community? Promotion and distribution is a huge challenge. Editing stops a lot of people from continuing with podcasting because they recognize that it is so much effort. The clipping videos for social media to drive streams or subscribers or downloads
00:11:23
Speaker
how much does Zencaster lean into education to help their podcast community be more successful and continue to keep them excited about podcasting? It's theoretically hard to wrap your head around how podcasting works if you haven't done it before. And so A, just helping people onboard and really understand how to use the tool and
00:11:45
Speaker
Not really just giving them tools to that can do the job, but telling them what job they should do with the tools and walk them through all of that. But we're definitely, that's an initiative that we've got right now is really fine tuning the onboarding process. And that equal, that also includes education, things like webinars and also just.
00:12:10
Speaker
We don't have this yet, but we'd love to have a platform agnostic sort of podcasting university piece of content. And it's always hard to prioritize on that on top of just all the other stuff that's got to get done to build the product and what's needed next. So we tend to follow our noses as far as what the creators are asking for. That is one of the things. We have a pretty good idea of what barriers are hitting and what speed bumps
00:12:40
Speaker
just through our customer support. Like we don't really have to ask for feedback. Like we, we get it pretty regularly and it's really just a matter of figuring out how to prioritize, not knowing what we should do, but in what order we should do those things. So based on that, what are customers asking for? When you look at the product roadmap for Zencaster and you're getting a lot of feedback from users, what is high priority for Zencaster in 2024?
00:13:07
Speaker
all sorts of things depending on the type of creator because we have podcasters, then we have other niche type of creators. But I would say the biggest things you hear most often is the growth side. That's the number one. They're like, hey, I've published and I'm just getting crickets. I need to figure out how do I actually get people listening to this or knowing if I'm
00:13:27
Speaker
saying the right thing, getting some of that first validation, which can be hard. I think they want connection. We hear a lot more from the hosts because they're directly using our platform, but the audience members as well, the audience wants to connect with, the host wants to connect more seamlessly with the audience. They generally are entrepreneurial in effect in some way. They're trying to
00:13:52
Speaker
monetize the audience or drive into a sales funnel or sometimes they are just trying to share some idea. And that's what's led us to offering monetization options as well. Again, this is where it comes into the order, right? Hey, these guys are entrepreneurial. They want to make money. So we have a monetization suite. You can do programmatic ads and paid guest spots and that sort of a thing. But we found for the vast, that's great for the ones who've already figured out the growth side, but the vast majority of our creators have not.
00:14:20
Speaker
we've come back around and said, okay, now that we've got some of that monetization stuff, now we need to make it so that you're big enough to actually have that monetization move the needle for you. And that's where the clipping, cross-promotion, I think networking our creators together. Right now, if you use Zencaster, it's, I wouldn't say solitary because you bring your guests and maybe your co-hosts, but
00:14:43
Speaker
It's a siloed experience and there's a big opportunity to open that up on Zencaster so that you could, for instance, search the network for someone who might be a great guest on your next episode or find another podcaster on the network that has a similar content. You guys either be a guest on each other's show or do ad swaps or things like this. Again, so you just overcome that problem that podcasting has without where it doesn't have that built in algorithmic audience
00:15:13
Speaker
growth feature. People talk about the power of community and if you listen to a lot of B2B SaaS marketers, community seems to be one of the major themes for 2024. So I'm all for connecting podcasters and making it easier for
00:15:29
Speaker
podcasters to get guest opportunities and to find guests. That's great. The other tool that I wanted to ask you about is the ability to take a podcast and run it through AI to get show notes and tweets and blog posts and LinkedIn posts. There are services like Summarize and Pod Squeeze that do that. They're definitely using it. Is this something that Zencaster is thinking about offering as well?
00:15:55
Speaker
We're already seeing, as you mentioned, services pop up with that makes perfect sense. Saves a lot of time for the creator. It's just not right on top of the pile for us. Our current initiative right now that we're launching is some more advanced editing tools, but right now we can help you remove alms and ahs and long pauses. But if you want to like.
00:16:13
Speaker
delete sections of content or add your intro and outro. It's not so straightforward. Our goal is you should be able to come to Zencaster, hit record, hit produce, hit publish, and have everything templated up the way that you want it and go back to running your business instead of the podcast taking all of that time.
00:16:33
Speaker
that right now, people who want to do some of that more advanced editing, they have to record and then they have to download it, do it in their own software suite and then bring it back online. A lot of people are still going to want to do that if they have that process in place. But for the new podcast creators coming on board.
00:16:49
Speaker
They don't want to and are probably not going to learn how to use even Audacity or even some of the easiest and free tools out there are very hard to understand how to use. Even Apple's movie, they're supposed to be like the easier ones like iMovie or whatever it's called.
00:17:09
Speaker
is not very straightforward and is not custom fit for the podcasting use case. Making it so that you can truly come to our platform and not have to leave and still get a really great professional output. Let me ask you about the competitive landscape because if you Google search for podcast recording or podcast hope, there are hundreds of companies out there that offer similar services
00:17:35
Speaker
The question that I would pose to you is how does Zencaster stand apart? It's a very fragmented market choice is often a really good thing, but it can also be very confusing. How do you view the competitive market and what does then cast or do from a marketing perspective to wave the flag to say to people who are trying to get into podcasting or already podcasting. We're one of the platforms that you need to consider because we've got all these features. We got all these great tools.
00:18:04
Speaker
and we should be one of the obvious choices out there.
00:18:08
Speaker
That's been an interesting journey, because when we first launched, we were the only real option as far as something that you didn't have. There were other options where you had to download an app or download a desktop app, but that's hard to get one-off guests to do. It's definitely gotten more competitive over time. I think our strategy to combat that is to not stay stagnant in one place, because if you just say, hey, I'm a double-ended remote recording tool,
00:18:36
Speaker
That used to be harder to make. Now you can download some libraries on GitHub and get something going pretty fast. But what is what we saw was that's just the beginning of the process. And our goal is to really be a kind of all in one and opinionated platform that says, hey, you have a voice, you want something to say?
00:19:02
Speaker
don't worry about learning all the mechanics and all the technicalities of podcasting in order to do that. We'll take that all off the table so you can just be a great host, find great guests, and we'll do the rest. What that means is we have to have editing, we have to have production tools, we have to have hosting service built in, and then all of the other growth and monetization stuff on top of that.
00:19:28
Speaker
And if you say, Hey, let's compare us to all of the remote recording platforms, there's lots of them say, Hey, let's compare us to all of the all in one podcasting platforms that handle every step of the way to help you find the success that you're after. There's maybe two or three options out there for that. I think we're the best of those options. If you look at the comparisons of not only the tool chain on paper, but the.
00:19:53
Speaker
workflow that you're getting out of it. I think that's how we combat that. On the marketing side, part of why we're doing these podcast tours. We know a lot of podcasters. Why don't we get out there and just talk to whoever will have us on and spread the word.
00:20:09
Speaker
question that I ask a lot of entrepreneurs and it's either an easy or difficult question depending on how you come at it. But what company or companies keep you up at night? That's an interesting question because that's evolved over time. I remember when the very first competitor to Zencaster, like we really were like the only tool like ours that existed at one time.
00:20:32
Speaker
And then I remember the first competitor that I knew of launched their platform and they came out of the gate and they had editing and hosting or they had some editing tool and some hosting tool. And I was just like, Oh man, I really lost. I was like, that panicked me. I was like, I gotta work double time. These guys are trying to eat our lunch. Like we gotta figure this out and.
00:20:58
Speaker
At least at that point in time, there was enough space in the market that didn't really have a significant effect on us. And I really over thought it and was overly worried about it. And I've more now adopted a strategy of certainly don't ignore your competitors, but don't fixate on them either. Especially if you're in a market leading position, if you're
00:21:25
Speaker
If you're paying too close attention to what everyone else is doing, you're not paying attention to what you need to do next. And then people are just copying you and catching up with you while you're looking backwards. And definitely pay attention, pull the good things out there. That's another thing that's good about competition is all these other companies are trying things. And you can see, okay, that worked for them. That worked for these guys. Let's take those ideas, iterate that into the next part of the product so you don't have to go through that validation cycle yourself.
00:21:52
Speaker
But yeah, it's tough because Spotify is a competitor of ours. They have Spotify, they bought Anchor, they have Spotify for podcasting. They on paper have all the different pieces. They have the monetization options. And so that can be harrowing saying like, we're up against companies that are billion dollar companies and multi-billion dollars. Even count Apple, you've got trillion dollar companies that are interested in the space and getting in on different sides and
00:22:21
Speaker
I guess I don't lose as much sleep about competition anymore. Maybe I should. I think more in terms of are we really carving out the path that we see from listening to our users?
Zencaster's Growth and Market Position
00:22:40
Speaker
And we're doing that fast enough. And you do think, is somebody else doing it faster than us? Are they on the right thread?
00:22:47
Speaker
So far, I've tended to see that all these different companies tend to have their own thesis that they're chasing. And while they may be iterating faster or slower, they're maybe not really headed in the same direction that we're going and in the same way. And yeah, that's a long-winded answer to say there's competition out there. There's some really huge ones that you could lose sleep over. But I've
00:23:11
Speaker
more worry about if we're really meeting. Like I said, we get tons of feedback from users and it's all great. And are we actually executing on that fast enough is, I think the, the bigger worry. Yeah. You've done a good job of answering my question at the same time, dancing around the question that I asked you. And as the next reporter, hey, listen, you didn't answer the question. I'm a Zencaster user. So obviously I'm very sensitive to other companies and I talked to other podcasters and you can avoid the fact that a company like Riverside.
00:23:41
Speaker
Descript has certainly become a lot more of an interesting player when it comes to podcasts. They start off as a video editing platform, but podcasts is certainly on their sites. There are some very interesting players out there putting aside companies like Apple and Spotify, which is why I asked you the question about differentiation. At some point in time, there's so much competition that sometimes comes down to price, sometimes comes to features, sometimes it comes to your branding that all of
00:24:06
Speaker
leads into a competitive mix and how you stand out from the crowd. It's exciting, but it's also very daunting at the same time.
00:24:13
Speaker
We pay attention. I think Descript is probably one of those companies that is on a closer track to executing on what we're trying to do as well. Although they're more, they're not really podcasting focused. They are, they do have a focus on podcasting, but it's not their, I don't know that there's their primary focus. They're doing interesting things and we've been in contact with them over the years. But yeah, I.
00:24:42
Speaker
I guess I just found that I didn't find a lot of value from building up anxiety about competition as far as what that drove the business towards. And I find a lot more value in being very focused on knowing who is our core user and what is it that they need and not trying to emulate so much what other people are doing and follow our own nose. Let's shift gears a little bit. We've talked about technology, but
00:25:12
Speaker
Let's focus on money. Uh, Zencaster has done some interesting things over the years when it comes to fundraising, you've raised a venture capital round, I believe in 2021.
00:25:26
Speaker
Can you walk us through that journey? How do you look at the fundraising landscape right now? Is Zencast looking for money? Is it something that you need to drive growth? And what has that experience been like when you're out there trying to convince people to finance your company?
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, great question. Yeah, we raised at the end of 2020. I think it closed in 2021, though. So right at the beginning of that year, we raised like four and a half million. And the goal of that fundraise was to because we're still just a recording platform. We had video and some other things, but we didn't have hosting any of the monetization stuff. So the goal of that fundraise was to build out the other pieces of the podcasting tool chain so that we can be a one stop shop for podcasters.
00:26:13
Speaker
We definitely got a big, for better or worse, COVID helped our business, which felt weird because you're in some way profiting off of this tragedy. But there's a lot more people at home, a lot more people who had time to focus on the podcast that they're thinking of. So we got a really good growth bump.
00:26:31
Speaker
out of that. And at the same time, we were realizing that there's lots of really well-funded players in this space. And if we're not careful and we don't have the money to iterate quickly, we could just be pushed to the margins and decided to fundraise. And that was a fun experience. I hadn't done that before that period, at least not to any effect. As I recall your question, like how did I experience the fundraising?
00:27:00
Speaker
It was, I actually enjoy fundraising. It can be a bit of a slog, but you're talking to lots of intelligent people and it's, it's a puzzle to solve. You get way more nos than you get yeses. And each time you're like, okay, they said no. Why did they say no? Okay. What is it? Is it actually the.
00:27:18
Speaker
our company or is it the way we're presenting it? And oftentimes it was, we're just not saying the right things that you have to get keyed into the things they care about. I learned very early on. Everybody loves the feel good story about like helping small creators feels good in the heart, but that's not what speaks to the brains of the VCs as far as like something that they can turn around and communicate to their LPs. We invested in these guys because of X, but you have to really give them the ammunition. They may love you.
00:27:48
Speaker
But if they don't have the ammunition that they need to defend that investment to their limited partners, then it's just not going to happen. And that was something I didn't really understand so intuitively going into it. We started our conversation when I asked you about the state of the podcast landscape right now.
00:28:11
Speaker
and it would be remiss if I didn't ask you where you see the industry going over the next two, three, four years, and how do you see Zencast are evolving as the podcast industry matures, attracts more creators, attracts more listeners, and becomes an even bigger media pillar, I guess, is the word for it.
Future Prospects for Podcast Monetization and Engagement
00:28:35
Speaker
There's lots of fun and interesting shifts going on in the space right now. We already talked about sort of the AI impact. I think maybe one of the biggest trends is we're seeing a blurring of the lines between podcast, podcasting used to be its own little world. What you're seeing is.
00:28:50
Speaker
Some people are just launching on YouTube and calling it a podcast. They're not even doing technically really a podcast. And the primary piece of consumption now for podcast audiences is becoming clips rather than full episodes. And this is a big part of the reason why we're helping people create those and share those.
00:29:12
Speaker
The super fans are more, the full episodes are for the super fans and the clips are where you're going out and getting in sort of the new listeners or the people who are passive fans of yours.
00:29:24
Speaker
And to that end, I think what we're seeing is that most podcasters nowadays are probably more appropriately called content marketers who are using podcasting as one of their channels. But they're also using TikTok and Instagram and a blog and a newsletter and all of these things. And I think.
00:29:46
Speaker
Cause at the end they're trying to market a message and why you use in every, these days you have to go multi-platform, multi-channel. We see podcasting as maybe the best and easiest way to execute on that because you can have a great.
00:30:01
Speaker
Get a great guest, do a long form recording. Whether or not you ship that as a podcast or not, you can then clip it out. And now you've got all the content that you need for the other platforms. You could even use AI to create a newsletter post or a blog out of it that then you edit upon as well. So it's a great starting point for just a content creation engine that you're going to be executing on all these different platforms.
00:30:28
Speaker
And that's already happening. I see that just going to continue along as we go. And I think also just thinking towards the future, I think we're going to start to see more and more. How do I put this? More and more healthy, niche communities that are self-sustaining and have monetization options that work well for them.
00:30:55
Speaker
as opposed to just the top few taking all of the money. That's what's happening right now. Part of that problem is advertisers, a lot of these guys are still coming from the radio space. This is a problem I encountered from the beginning of the company. I was like, hey, I think we have 10 million monthly downloads across all of the users on the platform.
00:31:17
Speaker
80% of them want to monetize and they can't. I went and talked to some advertisers and they were just like, I was like, Hey, I've got all this inventory. Let's do some, let's make some money. And they're just like, no. And I was like, Oh, okay. Tell me why. And there's like these advertisers, they don't have the bandwidth to deal with hundreds or thousands of creators. They can work with a few dozen maybe and
00:31:41
Speaker
even that's a lot for them. And they only want to work with because of that, they only want to work with the biggest ones. And all just all the money goes to the top big creators and everyone else is left out.
00:31:52
Speaker
This is part of the reason why we had a machine learning department early on so that we could transcribe the content because they're a bit concerned outside of just the workflow issue. The reason why they need to pay attention to each creator is they're worried about quality control. They don't want their ads running off of somebody who's saying racist slurs or talking about guns or whatever the sensitivity is of that certain company.
00:32:14
Speaker
They're highly tuned into that. And there was no way to say, Hey, we can give you confidence to work across a thousand different creators all in this niche without them feeling like they had to listen to all of that content. With the transcripts, we can say, Hey, we've transcribed it. We've understand what's in here. We've searched it for swearing or whatever. And now I can give you confidence to work across a larger group. That's something that's going to continue to grow. There's still a lot of progress that needs to be made there and buying from the advertisers, but also.
00:32:43
Speaker
I think backer programs are also a much better option for most kind of small to medium sized podcasters. Everybody's using Patreon right now, but Patreon helps you take money. It doesn't really help you provide value for that money. It's just another job that a podcaster has to load up on top of that. How do I?
00:33:00
Speaker
actually then give them a route. I can take them away, but how do I get them to do it? How do I get them to stay? That's pretty interesting from our perspective. I were thinking in the future about community and networking. What if you have a backer program? I won't get too into the weeds, but I think there's a lot of value you can provide by bringing the audience and the creators onto the same platform and then doing backer subscriptions and things like that.
00:33:24
Speaker
Lots of opportunities, lots of possibilities. Personally, if I was to start a podcasting related company, it would all be about distribution.
00:33:33
Speaker
taking podcasts, putting them into video clips, automatically streaming them to different platforms. I think extracting as much value you can from a podcast for many companies is when the magic happens. Josh, thank you for your insight in Susan Castor and the podcasting industry. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation.
00:33:55
Speaker
subscribe via apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B or SaaS company looking for more sales and leads, but struggling to do impactful marketing, we should talk. I work as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor.
00:34:09
Speaker
My services include a 90-day marketing sprint that combines strategy and tactical execution to quickly move the needle. And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. It features tools, templates, and worksheets that jumpstart your marketing, perfect for entrepreneurs. And you can find it, of course, on Amazon. You can reach out to me by email, mark at markevans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.