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Cutting-Edge Podcasting: How AI is Changing the Game with w/Josh Nielsen
173 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez sits down with Josh Nielsen, the entrepreneurial mind behind Zencastr, to dive deep into the revolution of content marketing strategies and the transformative role of AI in podcast production. They dissect the challenges and successes of repurposing long-form content across various platforms, explore groundbreaking tools that simplify podcasting from a daunting two-week setup to a brisk 90-minute creation process, and discuss Zencastr’s inception and its response to the podcasting industry’s resurgence. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for marketers eager to employ AI in enhancing audio quality, transcription accuracy, and overall content efficiency. Tune in to unravel how podcasting can evolve from a desire into a streamlined, accessible reality.
Timestamps:
00:00 Zencastr born from failed music collaboration platform.
04:32 Coding project started in 2014, faced challenges.
06:50 Zencast began in niche market, then boomed.
10:46 Experienced team member emphasizes importance of data.
15:22 Podcasting evolving, aims for simplicity and accessibility.
17:25 Focusing on tech to stay competitive and grow.
20:43 Create and share content efficiently with AI.
22:45 Producers set up, writers listen and edit.
28:28 Create multiple podcast episodes to engage customers.
32:15 Expanding podcast content, seeking to overcome barriers.
36:08 Valuable tool for interviewing with thoughtful questions.
37:07 AI potential in content creation and follow-ups.
42:03 Building relationships through meaningful conversations leads to success.
44:50 Friend made 10-hour sound machine, went viral.
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Transcript
Introduction to Josh Nielsen and Zencaster
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI driven marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez and my friends call me Dan Chas. And today I'm excited to talk to Josh Nielsen, the founder of Zencaster. So Josh, welcome to your own platform since we're recording on Zencaster.
The Origin Story of Zencaster
00:00:17
Speaker
Thanks, Dan. Thanks. Happy to be here. Thank you for the invite. So if you're listening to this show, you've already heard me talk about ZenCasters. It's one of the primary tools that I'm using to speed up my production workflow in podcasting. And I've loved this platform. I've written heavily about it. But I wanted to go back and get a little bit deeper with Josh on the backstory behind this platform is actually one I don't know.
00:00:40
Speaker
how you got started in AI Josh and then use cases for this platform. But to go back to the beginning, how did this start for you in creating Zencaster?
00:00:51
Speaker
So Zincaster was sort of born out of the ashes of a previous attempt at making a company. I was building, man, this is like 2013-ish, I was building a platform to help electronic musicians collaborate together online and like swap files back and forth.
00:01:15
Speaker
You could upload just like the
Challenges and Innovations in Podcasting
00:01:17
Speaker
drum track, the synth track, the baseline or whatever, and then people could collaborate with you and remix you and that sort of a thing. That didn't work out in the end for many, many reasons, but it got me working with audio in the browser, trying to figure out what the capabilities were there. And as we were working on that, and as that project kind of petered out, the browsers kept launching more and more features like
00:01:46
Speaker
When I started, you couldn't, for instance, access the microphone from a website. Then they launched this get user media API. Now you can grab audio right from the microphone and all that. As I was out pitching that previous company, somebody along the line said, hey, I don't know about musicians, but podcasters have this problem with, I think he just said like sharing audio back and forth.
00:02:14
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, that's cool. But like, I'm really excited about this music thing. And you know, I'm a hobbyist musician. And that was like, you know, felt like that was back in the cash in on your passion era. And I thought like, okay, you got to stick with, you know, this and but I'd always listen to podcasts. I just never been involved on the creation side. So the idea stuck in my head. I parked on that for like two or three years.
00:02:42
Speaker
and then found out I had a baby on the way, and I was like, okay, I need to get serious about building something with long-term value here. So I came back to that idea, interviewed some podcasters, found out, sure enough, they were using Skype call recorders at the time. What year was this? This would be like 2014-ish, 2015.
00:03:08
Speaker
I remember Skype call recording was the thing for podcasting. I think that was the only thing, unless you were going in person with like a Tascam and two microphones, that was like the only, those are the two options you had back then. People were doing that too. But what I found is like, as you know, if you record a Skype call, it only records on one end.
Market Fit and Zencaster's Evolution
00:03:25
Speaker
So you could sound great or fine, but your guest is going to at best sound highly compressed at worst, dropout, robotic sounding.
00:03:33
Speaker
And when I was talking to people, they were like, Skype sucks, can't use that. So people were using Audacity. They were trying to train their guests to open Audacity and record, export an MP3, send it. And they're like, we just stopped having guests because it was too much of a hassle. And the quality was poor. And I was like, well, that's a shame. And I was like, you know, now we can do this with the browser, I think. Let me try. And so I started building a prototype.
00:04:00
Speaker
It really wasn't truly possible when I started to build it, but it became possible as I was building it. I just didn't realize that. And I got lucky because the browsers were all launching these new features. So that was sort of the genesis of the company and how I got tipped onto the podcasting space. There's a lot more there. We could dig into you, but that's sort of the in a nutshell.
00:04:24
Speaker
So, when did it actually become usable? When did you launch into it where you actually had customers paying for ZenCuster? So, I think I broke ground on the code in 2014 and then in 2015, I thought it was going to take me six weeks. It took me six months to launch a very duct taped together open prototype of it. And
00:04:52
Speaker
I ran it as a free service for almost two years because, as I mentioned, this is very nascent technology. The browsers were changing their APIs all the time. It wasn't very stable in that regard. And so I wanted to wait for that to mature up a little bit.
00:05:09
Speaker
had I think the same sort of fear of charging because, you know, I was excited that I built something that people were using, you know, there was thousands of people using it while I was still in a free plan. I built lots of other things that nobody cared about. And so I was just stoked on that. I was contracting on the side.
00:05:28
Speaker
And so I had basically I was doing like, you know, four to six hours a day consulting for other companies and then spend the rest of the time on Zencaster. Lived pretty lean and so I had basically infinite runway, if you want to call it that, to kind of figure it out.
00:05:48
Speaker
You know, on the side here, during this, I'd moved to Australia and then New Zealand. My wife's from there, had the baby there. Then we moved to Thailand. And that's where I actually launched the paid plans almost two years into the project.
00:06:03
Speaker
And yeah, within the it was very strong product market fit. This is a problem everybody had. It was pretty easy to get new users. I've just gone Twitter search for people that were complaining about Skype screwing up their podcast or like defending themselves against their audience because their audience was attacking them about their the quality of the show.
00:06:22
Speaker
Yeah, even big shows were doing it. I remember Michael Hyatt, big podcast was using Skype for his guests because that was the only way to do it at the time. Yep. Yeah. Early podcasting days. I remember, I mean, podcasting had its second wave around 2015 through today. Right. So it got, it got big. I remember that's how sweet fish really became big or B2B growth when I was hosting that show. I mean, James started that around 2015, 2016 back when podcasting was really making its comeback.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, and that was the other thing is when I started zencaster podcasting was not a hot market like it was this weird thing on the side of social media that just kind of wouldn't die and like had all these diehards that were in a lot of them coming from like radio and things like that and then
00:07:09
Speaker
as you saw, like, and this was as I was building it, then like Serial and This American Life are the two that I really remember being those milestone shows where they were like, whoa, we're getting a million downloads an episode and we're making money with ads. And that turned a lot of heads suddenly Spotify and pretty much all the major players announced some sort of podcasting initiative around that time. And
Transcription and AI Advancements
00:07:37
Speaker
that's when
00:07:39
Speaker
A, we realized we kind of had a tiger by the tail. And B, we realized we probably needed to raise some money at some point because you've got billion and trillion dollar companies jumping into the mix.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah. Cause I certainly remember, I mean, I, I think the first podcast I downloaded was in 2007 back when you know, you're holding those original iPods and they added it into the iPod just to bring more value to the iPod back then I was downloading like manager tools. And, uh, was a podcast that still around like that taught me my one-on-one on how to be a good manager. Still a fantastic podcast that I feel like no one's ever heard of, but they've up their huge.
00:08:19
Speaker
one of the original OGs in the business world and podcast. And then there's this awesome podcast called Pod Runner. And all he does is come up with really fast beats, timed beats per minute for running so that you can, you know, run at 160 beats per minute. It really is cool and it's fun.
00:08:35
Speaker
Interesting, and he does that as a podcast. Yeah, he's been doing it. I do. I've been listening to it since at least 2007. I think he probably started only a few years before that because podcasting wasn't a thing until 2004. I think it was first podcast launched, you know? Wow. Yeah, it's interesting. I hadn't heard that one. That's something you'd think would be more like an app or something, but it's fun to see how creative people get with it.
00:08:56
Speaker
I think he tried an app, but you know, people get in the groove and then code is difficult to deal with and there's upkeep on it. Uh, that would have been a great paid app for him, but he ends up just getting sponsors for it and probably is a lifestyle business for him. I'm sure he's been coasting on that cause he still uploads. So I'm still listening to podrunner tracks and he's been doing it for, you know, almost 20 years now.
00:09:17
Speaker
That's awesome. We'll have to check it out. Great little beats that are different speeds that you can pick. Podcasting has been around. You caught the second wave that podcasting came through when it was more than just a few people in churches, which was a big market for podcasts. Yeah, it still is, I think. They were uploading podcasts early on. Big use case there. But you caught the second wave and started writing it in. When did AI start getting on your radar to build it to the platform?
00:09:45
Speaker
So that's something, so I started the company solo, but then trying to think exactly when this happened. Eventually I brought on a co-founder a few years in, Adrian Lopez, awesome guy. He was a friend of mine from earlier startups that I'd worked at in LA.
00:10:08
Speaker
And he had gone to startup after startup and became part of the founding team of a company called Flipagram. And they got bought by ByteDance and turned into what became TikTok. And he stayed on for a little while after that transition, went to Beijing and all that, but then moved on and
00:10:28
Speaker
When I brought him onto the team, A, I just needed help growing the team, managing the team. But also, he had been at a company product that was user-generated content. They became the fastest growing app in the App Store ever through product-led growth and got acquired. And he had already experienced what I saw as the next step in the road for Zencaster. So it made a lot of sense in that regard.
00:10:54
Speaker
you know, when he came onto the team, he was like, I was very product focused, like, talk to the users to tell you what you want, you build that into the product, rinse and repeat. But he is sort of a bigger thinker, I suppose on, and he'd already see because he'd been experienced in these companies already, on knowing the value of like information, and understanding the data, giving you the ability to like,
00:11:22
Speaker
connect users that talk about similar topics or connect advertisers with users and building a network out of the user base basically.
00:11:34
Speaker
And to do that, we needed transcripts. You can't understand what's in a podcast easily unless you have it transcribed. It's very expensive to transcribe content back then, even now. And so we've had for, I mean, three or four years now, our own machine learning team. And the initial goal was we just need to be able to cost effectively transcribe the content. A, it's just something that I didn't realize you guys had your own transcription engine.
00:12:00
Speaker
Yeah. And that's one of our major advantages because if we were doing all of our transcriptions through Google's API, it would cost us like 200 grand a month or something. That's a time because podcasts are freaking long. Social clips, it's long form. Yeah. I haven't checked recently, but there was a time when it was
00:12:20
Speaker
You know, we're probably spending 15, 20 grand a month on the transcriptions, but it would be like 200 grand a month if we were using Google's API. And we're like about 1% word error rate off of Google, so it's pretty dang close.
00:12:37
Speaker
but a lot more cost-effective. And so that was our initial inroad into productizing AI into the company. But then comes, now that you've got the transcripts, let's topic model it. Let's start to understand what people are talking about. When are the transitions between topics
00:12:57
Speaker
what is potentially an interesting topic, what's a funny top, what's a funny section and those sorts of things. Because as you know, podcasters, especially when they're just getting started, they're trying to find their niche, they're trying to find what hits. And if you've got the transcript and you're serving the content and you get a sense of what's most interesting and then you open that up to the users, you can then give them analytics back about when you talk about
00:13:25
Speaker
you know, dogs on TikTok. That's what really hits our digital marketing on LinkedIn. That's what's engaging there, you know, on a granular basis. So it
Podcast Production and Distribution Strategies
00:13:38
Speaker
gets real broad. I mean, there's all sorts of fun stuff you can do with AI, but we've been, I don't know if it's boring. It's more, it's sort of the things that you would already, how do I put this?
00:13:51
Speaker
Podcasting is still catching up with a lot of other mediums. So things that you just think go part and parcel with creation, like on Twitter, I make a tweet and people see it and I get new audience members because people retweet it and there's like this way for you to find an audience or TikTok. I just get suggested to the right people in a growing audience. That doesn't exist in podcasting inherently on its own. No.
00:14:18
Speaker
It's a black box man. Yeah, people ask me being the director of audience growth for sweet fish and I was helping lots of podcasts grow They'd ask me like how do you grow a podcast? I'm like, here's the hard answer It's really hard because you can't grow a podcast through podcasting unlike every other channel almost
00:14:35
Speaker
Yup. Exactly. On YouTube, you don't have to go outside of YouTube. You can hack, you can do YouTube just through doing YouTube, right? Through search or their, their algorithm. LinkedIn, you can go through just through LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram. There's ways to grow on the channel without having to bring in outside influence. That's not true with podcasting. You have to bring in audience from somewhere else, unless you were lucky and you caught the wave early and you caught the downloads needed to grow, get some SEO rankings, you know, for like B2B podcasting.
00:15:04
Speaker
Or b2b marketing, which is how b2b growth grew initially It was just an seo play and people searching for b2b marketing or b2b growth their podcast ranked They got users slowly and steadily and now they're big enough to where they always rank now Podcasting not so much. It's about other platforms there
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah. And so a lot of what we're trying to do in the podcasting space, if you compare it to like other mediums, it kind of sounds like all older. We already know this or that sort of a thing, but that's sort of the beauty of it. The roadmap's already been built on all these other platforms. We just got to get podcasting up to speed and make it simple and easy to create there. I mean, when we started present caster, people were using an average of like six or seven different tools, spending hours and hours. I forgot what the exact was like 10 hours per episode sometimes.
00:15:54
Speaker
jumping between all these services and there was no roadmap. It was like you had to figure out how to put this tool chain together for yourself. And so that was one of our main things to just lower the barrier of entry to creation. But then once you do that, then you realize that's not the only problem. Like that's just the beginning. And then you've got to figure out how do they actually distribute the content? And then most importantly, how do you find and grow the audience?
00:16:20
Speaker
And these are all just things that have been solved other places already. We just need to actually implement them into this somewhat old kind of old style medium, this weird podcasting space.
00:16:35
Speaker
I remember three years ago, I was working for sweet fish and it podcasting was complicated enough that big companies, tech companies, smart companies were coming to sweet fish to help walk them through the process or just do it for them because there was none of the steps in themselves were hard.
00:16:53
Speaker
But altogether, so confusing, intimidating. It was for me, and I'm technical. I was automating the heck out of CRMs and marketing automation sequences, SMS, email, direct mail, and creating these awesome journeys. Still, my first podcast, Sweetfish, did for me because I didn't know how to do it. Once I learned all the steps, I'm like, you know, these are really simple. We did an analysis one time where, like, Sweetfish was the biggest B2B podcast agency.
00:17:19
Speaker
Uh, three years ago, we had a hundred shows. The next closest agency had like 44 or something. And we're like, you know, what, what could another competitor do that's going to put us out of business? And out of that brainstorm of like, what's most likely to disrupt sweet fish at a revelation three years ago, I'm like, it's not going to be a service industry. It's going to be a SAS company because all these steps of making a great podcast that we're currently doing for customers, that would take us usually two weeks to turn an episode.
00:17:49
Speaker
with all the assets, all these are going to be automated. And that's when we started, we try to build tech, but it's really hard to be tech focused when you're a service focused company. It's just a different skill set and we didn't have it. We tried, we wasted money on it.
00:18:07
Speaker
Now Sweetfish at that time, or now, now Sweetfish has decided to go up market and do stuff that can't be automated. It can't be done with AI, which is good for them. So that's a smart move. I've decided to just lean into tech. I'm like, I'm just going to learn how to do the tech and make the most of it. But when I was, I met you, like, or no, I met Zen, I discovered Zencaster a year and a half ago at a, it was a conference podcast movement.
00:18:33
Speaker
year and a half ago and i knew it was coming i'm like someone someone smart it's almost here some vendors gonna figure out how to connect hosting do just enough editing and publishing someone's gonna bring it all together cuz i could see publishing pushing back in the editing i can see the hosting platforms pushing into editing i'm like someone's gonna pull it all together and i was walking around the vendor space a podcast movement and i was literally just asking i'm like hey can you pop can you do these three things and then be like well almost
00:19:02
Speaker
Almost and then I got to the zen I got to the zencaster booth. They're like we just launched the all-in-one. I'm like Yes Somebody finally did it because it's such a pain to move from one platform to another and I hate working through Descript Which would link something of the some of these things together, but I hate Descript so You guys were exciting and then you hadn't even added the clips thing that click the clips automated clips came a year later Yeah
00:19:28
Speaker
Which was awesome because that was the other that's the main. Way to distribute a podcast is to turn it into clips and it was freaking hard. Even with AI tools today, it's hard. You upload it to video and video does a great job of slicing and dicing it.
00:19:44
Speaker
horrible. And then now you have like, what 510 clips, you got to post to four or five different platforms. Oh, that's a social media nightmare. Now you got to go write copy for all of them and buffer go to buffer. It's still way too many steps. Yeah, we um,
00:20:00
Speaker
You know, that kind of the clipping tool, I mean, I think the writing was already on the wall in the market for that. Like that's become, I think the more primary piece of content people are consuming as opposed to full length episodes. But for us personally, as a company, we were like, Hey, we need to get really good at our social media marketing. And so I was doing a lot of research on social media marketing. And because it's, you know,
00:20:25
Speaker
It can be very cheap or free, a very cost-effective way to market and grow. But you'd start listening to these, you end up running into Gary Vaynerchuk content, or I forgot the other guy. Alex Hormozi. Yeah, Hormozi, the big stacked dude.
00:20:49
Speaker
you know, really, there's a lot of fluff around things you can do. But really, at the end of the day, their advice is you just need to pump out a ton of content on all the platforms all the time. Like Gary Vaynerchuk will say, it's really simple. You just need to post eight, like
00:21:08
Speaker
Multiple times a day across eight to ten different platforms or something to that effect and I was like man that sounds so simple but hard and that was sort of the goal with the clipping tools. Can we make it so that you can actually execute on a strategy like that.
00:21:28
Speaker
while only doing in like, you know, an hour of your time once a week or something like that, or something very contained, maybe a couple hours. Like, if you could record your podcast for 30 minutes, spend the other 30 minutes, you know, setting up your clips, have the AI, find the clips for you, have the AI, write the summaries, of course you can edit them, and then connect that all to your social accounts and then auto schedule them out throughout the month.
00:21:53
Speaker
Then you've got something approximately close to what those guys are recommending you can do to grow your social media and your audience a lot faster. And yeah, so that sort of was our internal motivation for building that out as well as those external kind of market factors.
00:22:15
Speaker
working man you guys have made in my opinion the right bets on the right things making it easier to record do the minimal editing of course you can download it and do more which for some of my clients I do and then publish it and then have it clipped it's it's such a smooth system but I can't imagine going back now because Sweetfish man it used to take two weeks to turn an episode and rightly so it was a freaking lot of steps you because our team hadn't heard the episode the client could
00:22:44
Speaker
recorded it we'd go grab it and download it from Riverside and Then what happens while the producers got to go set it up and build the timeline for one episode for every single episode member managing a hundred shows and They're all doing like an episode two episodes a month or one episode a week Or something and the writers got to listen to it didn't even know what to write for a headline for it Let alone the show notes sometimes write a blog post for it and then create like go through and manually Like find the time stamps for the clips to send to the video editor who would then hand caption the thing
00:23:16
Speaker
Based on the in and out points, the writer headset, and then that writer would write the blog post, and then it would go to the audio engineer to clean up the audio part, have to go separately to a video person to clean up their doing YouTube. And then all these assets would have to be assembled in a Google folder, then sent back to the client, of which the client still had to take the painstaking time of like, other than we'd post the episode, but the blog post, all the social media posts, they'd have to post themselves.
00:23:44
Speaker
So much work. Two weeks just for us to get our part, let alone them posting it out on social, which most of the time they freaking wouldn't. We deliver the assets to it. They don't post it. It takes too much time to post. Now with Zencaster, what took Sweetfish two weeks between something like Zencaster and I use Cast Magic to come up with all the written content?
00:24:05
Speaker
It's done in 90 minutes per episode.
Podcasting vs Webinars for Content Marketing
00:24:09
Speaker
As soon as we're done recording this episode, I will click a few settings. I will click render. It will be done in five minutes or 10 minutes or so, however long, and then I'll download it, put it in Cast Magic.
00:24:27
Speaker
And I'll probably spend a little, most of my time is actually going to making thumbnails because a good thumbnail can go pretty far. If you make a good podcast cover art, it makes for good YouTube thumbnails too, I discovered. So I spend extra time using AI tools to make that.
00:24:42
Speaker
Um, but now the editing's kind of done for me automatically. And let's have a big edit to make, uh, through Zemcaster. And then it just publishes. So Cass magic writes all the content for me, blog posts, show notes, title ideas. I mix and match a little bit, publish it. Bam. This thing's done and we're scheduled out. It'll be scheduled out weeks, but it'll be done within 90 minutes of when we're finished writing or, uh, recording this because of just the efficiency of the program plus the AI tools and doing the smart stuff they do. It's amazing.
00:25:11
Speaker
Man, I'm glad, I'm glad it's working so well for you. That's definitely what we're trying to empower. And because in a lot of, like you said, with your clients, in a lot of cases, the difference between making it that much easier, that much less time is the difference between doing it and just not doing it. It's not like a lot of people, it's not like they're just gonna do it poorly for a really long time. If it's not working, they're gonna stop, you know? And so if we want,
00:25:38
Speaker
to really empower podcasters. And quite frankly, now we're thinking in terms of more just content marketers. It's a good way to look at it. You got to just make it really quick and easy and respect their time. The less time you can make it take for them to do is going to explode the amount of people that are able to create. I mean, if you look at
00:26:02
Speaker
There's billions of podcast listeners now. There's maybe 250 active podcasts out there. And so the ratio of creators to consumers is way off compared to any other medium. I think Twitter and TikTok have a
00:26:25
Speaker
20 to 30% creators to whatever the rest ratio of consumers. Podcasting should be more like that, but it's just been too dang hard to figure out and to actually create. It's too hard to, if you get that figured out, too hard to find an audience and get that validation you need to keep
00:26:43
Speaker
put cranking it cranking it out. And then if you're like trying to make money, it's too hard to find advertisers and or even if you're trying to just run a funnel to your product, it's hard to get analytics to track that. And so it's it's just way behind where you would think
00:27:00
Speaker
you know, where a lot of other mediums are at the moment. And if we can really just make it super deeper, quick and easy, like think like as easy, obviously it'll take longer, but functionally as easy as like posting on Instagram, adding some filters and that sort of a thing. That's when I think we're really going to see a huge explosion in the number of actually truly active podcasts out there.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah. I don't think even amongst marketers, most marketers haven't figured out how good podcasting is. In B2B, they're still chasing webinars over there, which is ridiculous. They literally make it hard on themselves because they have to... Like a webinar, you have to schedule out and then you have to promote it.
00:27:44
Speaker
but you don't even know what you're promoting because the content for it's usually not done, especially not finalized until the day before, maybe even the morning of, right? So you don't even know what you're promoting and then people get to it and then you do it. Podcasts the other way around, we schedule the thing, we come up with the content here just through a good conversation of which I usually find that podcasts have way more valuable tidbits in them than webinars do usually. Right, yeah. And you can just kind of react to it.
00:28:13
Speaker
And then the promotion isn't up front. It's on the back end. It's just distribution at that point. It's just slicing and dicing the content. It's ungated and open for everyone to listen to or gated either way. Like it's still a more efficient model, but content marketers are still waking up to that fact. I'm like, you need to be doing not one episode a month, not even one episode a
Zencaster's Vision for Simplifying Podcasting
00:28:33
Speaker
week. I'd be doing multiple episodes a week.
00:28:35
Speaker
using a tool like this to interview your content marketers. Why not use a podcast? Come up with a separate podcast for your products and just do nothing but talk about it because your customers will be interested in it. It's a great way to distribute product information way better. Go and interview your best customers' success stories and they're all going to want the limelight.
00:28:57
Speaker
It's an easy way to get testimonials. It's good, good, good content, especially if you're have actionable things that how they're doing it versus how others are doing it. I know that's when I'm a super fan of a platform like Zencaster, I want to know how other people are using it. It's what we'll talk about in a sec. You can use it to unpack missing pieces of your website. You're like, Oh, we don't have a founder story. Oh, we don't have, we don't have solution use cases for all the different types of verticals we sell to.
00:29:22
Speaker
Go and interview the people doing it. And then you will like ask the question strategically to fill in the page. Cause then you can go and get the content. Most marketing is really just interviewing to get the content and then running it through a marketing filter to present it. But a podcast and you kill two birds with one stone because it's easier to get people to show up to it in a smooth interface like this. It's easier to push record, run through, take the transcript, run it through AI and pull out all the, everything else you need from it.
00:29:49
Speaker
That's the real key, is Zencaster produces a transcript that you can run AI, chat GPT through to actually pull the content you need out of it. I think that's the secret sauce people aren't thinking about. It's just more efficient to getting all the other work you need done in marketing. Yeah. I think the roadmap has been clear for a long time. It's just getting the tooling and the automation around it. When I was
00:30:14
Speaker
My first startup job was like 2010 ish. I was working at a company in Los Angeles. It was run by Jason Calacanis who had the This Week in Startups podcast, which I think he still does, but he also does all in podcasts now. And it was like right behind my desk where they had their studio and like their sound boards and all that. And he,
00:30:39
Speaker
he just had a really great content marketing flow going. He would record in a live room on Ustream, so he had a live audience and you could hang out with the super fans there. They would record that and publish it as a podcast and as a YouTube
00:30:57
Speaker
post to YouTube as well, then they would cut it up and clip it, create a bunch of social media content out of it, do like blog and stuff around it as well. And so that one hour or 40 minutes or whatever they spent recording turned into a ton of content that they could use on all different channels, you know, live YouTube, podcasts, Twitter, whatever. And this was 14 years ago, but he had a team of like,
00:31:24
Speaker
I think you had five sales guys just on the sales team and then producers and sound guys and, you know, I don't know exactly, but there's probably like 10 people involved in this project. And obviously not everybody has the money or the ability to like do that. And so.
00:31:41
Speaker
very few people could actually execute on it. So that's been from the beginning, like, hey, if we could actually do what he was doing without those 10 people, that's really going to open this up for a lot of people. And so still tracking towards that goal. We don't have live yet.
00:31:56
Speaker
That would be really awesome. Something would become at some point. And, you know, just all those different pieces. But the clipping is a real big part of realizing that dream of taking that long form content and turning it into a content marketing machine as opposed to just a podcast.
00:32:15
Speaker
Man, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid and I'm trying to do as many podcasts as I can. I'm trying to figure out how to overcome my own barriers. I'm doing about one solo episode a week, one guest-based interview a week.
00:32:29
Speaker
I'm working with some potential people to be like co-hosts so I could start adding more because I'm just like seeing the value and it's become so easy to post produce. I'm like, well, okay. Now that, now that Zencaster has made it easier for me to get all the hard part out of the way, now I can really run. So how many, how many episodes a week can I do in different formats that are still not.
00:32:49
Speaker
that are still highly educational and without me repeating myself. So I'm not revisiting the same thing over and over again, new information. One of them is a live thing. So I'll have to probably do that with Restream, and then I'll have to download that and bring that back to Zencaster. But still, Zencaster still becomes the distribution for it. And then maybe the clip. I don't know. Sometimes the clip tool gets interesting when you bring in outside videos.
00:33:17
Speaker
What are you finding is the new bottleneck? Is it finding enough great guests? Or where are you hung up now that you've gotten past some of the barriers? Let's see. Yeah. For me, getting the right kinds of... I mean, it's specific to me, but getting the right kinds of guests is tricky. And I guess that's still the bottleneck even for the other show where I'm producing more than I'm hosting.
00:33:44
Speaker
There are some things, just little things for a Zencaster where it's like, I can't add an intro outro video. Otherwise in most cases, like that's for some shows, like they have to have, they have to have that. They want that. Creating images for the episode thumbnail. I have to do and make twice to push to YouTube. Right now I'm using Zapier to push to YouTube automatically.
00:34:10
Speaker
The funny thing about Zapier is it won't take the image thumbnail and make the thumbnail or even try to crop it into the horizontal. It doesn't even dry. So I always have to come up with that afterwards. I have to set a reminder to go and once it's uploaded on that day, I have to come in and set the thumbnail for it. You know, there's really not a lot in the way anymore. So it's really my own imagination and ability to actually come up with something to talk about, which for guests, it's easy. I just have to come up with questions.
00:34:40
Speaker
I even developed a GPT called My Showrunner that does almost all my pre-production now. I didn't for this episode, but for most episodes where I have a guest, the custom GPT actually walks through the step of doing research on the guest, coming up with angles, coming up with titles, outlining the whole show. Then once it's done, I could just plug the transcript that Zencaster puts into it. It'll actually start writing the show notes based on the title and the angle and the guest's expertise. It takes all that into account.
00:35:10
Speaker
I've automated quite a bit of this podcast production and now it's really bringing in other voices. Otherwise I just can't, with all the other client work that I do, I can't come up with enough content every week to keep it going. So by bringing in some other voices to collaborate with, it should help. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, we've also experimented with using
00:35:33
Speaker
this idea of a virtual producer for the show.
Automation and Future Innovations in Podcasting
00:35:40
Speaker
I was working with a startup coach a while back. There's diminishing returns on this over time, partially because chat GPT isn't sucking in fresh information all the time.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, you can say like, I am a startup coach focusing on seed stage startups. What are the top 20 questions I can answer that's going to provide value to that audience that I can post on social media or something like that. And it'll pop up all these questions. Some of them are, you know,
00:36:13
Speaker
Some of them are better than others, but I've definitely found it valuable in conjunction with what I've already kind of got going on in my head to just find good, thoughtful questions that you can interview people with. And, you know, we've even toyed with the idea of, you know, at Zencaster onboarding, one of the barriers is you kind of need to use it with someone else.
00:36:38
Speaker
And sometimes that can take a while to schedule or get somebody there. And I've been toying with the idea of, hey, maybe the first time they come, we just put them in a recording room. And we have a virtual interviewer that just says, tell us your market. Tell us your target audience. We'll give you some questions. Let's create our first five clips and post them on social media right now. We don't need to wait for anybody else to do anything. And so maybe we'll see something like that pretty soon.
00:37:07
Speaker
Oh, that'd be interesting. Because sometimes I'm showing up to clients and they actually have all the expertise they need to actually create fantastic content, but they just need someone to ask some questions and draw it out. So there is something about good question asking and then responding to it. It'll be interesting to see if AI can do it. And if it could do it in such a way that the response it captures afterwards is good for camera.
00:37:32
Speaker
versus a human host doing it. I thought of two other things that are handicaps for me right now is, and I've messaged you about one a few months ago about being able to follow up with a guest afterwards.
00:37:45
Speaker
major one, which is one of those things that because it's not automated, it doesn't get done. And you and I have both been guests on shows like dozens of times where we're like, wait, weren't we a guest on that show? I wonder if they ever published that episode. They published it long ago and just never told you about it, which is a huge miss for the show itself. Because if that person would have published it on their social media, that would have been a little bit of a trickle of something, which means they're missing it on every single guest.
00:38:13
Speaker
Or they'll tell you about it like six weeks later after you've done five other podcast spots and they just send you the link to the show. And you're like, I don't even remember what we talked about. I don't want to just post this on my LinkedIn and say, Hey, here's a podcast episode. I want to say, if you listen to this, you're going to learn about this or this is what's interesting about it. And so I heard 100% agree with you.
00:38:36
Speaker
that's something that we're actively working into Zencaster flow is not only making it easy for the creator or the host to give the guests what they need to effectively promote the content and automate all that, but also to have a concept of like, there's different ways to be a podcaster. One is you can be a host and be on the show and do all of that work, or you can be the guest.
00:39:07
Speaker
And a lot of people, I think coming down the road, we'll probably have profiles on Zencaster just for guests that you can follow. This is not someone who creates podcasts, but they're on a lot of podcasts and you can follow them, you can subscribe to them and people can build up their status and stature and their content kind
Strategic Podcasting for Relationship Building and Sales
00:39:26
Speaker
of on easy mode. That's kind of cool. I like that. Yeah, that's what I do. I've tried a few times to like do a podcast.
00:39:33
Speaker
I mean, we've done some like, there is a podcast about like the story of the founding of Zencaster and like the building that's called Digital. Yeah, and it was buried in there somewhere. I just couldn't find it in the link, the main navigation. Yeah. So we've done some stuff like that, but it's a lot of work on top of like the business as well to like do all that. So I just now do pod, what we call podcast tours. Um, we reach out to people on the platform and say, Hey, I'm available to be a guest on whatever. And because.
00:40:01
Speaker
And you know, normally in that case, he'd be concerned about like, is this podcast big enough for like it to be worth my time or something like that. But if you're and this is where I think it comes back to that relationship between the host after the fact, if by being on a podcast, even if it's a smaller show,
00:40:20
Speaker
If I'm generating good content, that's going to create good clips. And if I can use those to use in my social media as well, then it's ROI positive regardless. And it's fun. And it's a lot easier than being on your side of the screen.
00:40:37
Speaker
I find it, even if I don't get clips and they have no reach, like episode one, and because I'm a big proponent of starting podcasts, I've been many people's episode one, which is awesome. The thing I love most about being a guest on the podcast is I find when different people ask me different questions and different ways of asking it, I unlock new insights myself. People couch a question, you're like, ooh, that's a good one.
00:41:05
Speaker
What I think about that is this I'm like, huh I didn't realize I thought that like all of a sudden like it just gets me thinking different ways Which is why I'm always I'm always game to be a guest But of course, I love being a host too because I could have people like you on and learn a ton in the process Yeah, likewise So what are some ways people are using zen caster? Differently or that you've seen are your your rockstar clients Using it differently
00:41:34
Speaker
You know, one interesting thing that is sort of starting to gain more traction is podcasting as a sales channel. So it can be quite hard to maybe get your target customer on a call, excuse me.
00:41:50
Speaker
It can be quite hard to maybe get the attention of the client you're after. But if you say, hey, I've got a podcast and my audience would love to hear your insights as a thought leader in the space, then it strokes the ego. They feel kind of in an honored position.
00:42:10
Speaker
They feel like your audience wants to hear from them, which they do. And then you get on a call and instead of having a sales deck that's not going to be very compelling or probably interesting to that person, you have a conversation with them about what they care about.
00:42:28
Speaker
and now you build a relationship. Whether or not that turns into an immediate sell or not, they're surely going to remember you and your service a lot more than whatever else, whatever sales email they're getting. And on top of that, it's fun. Podcasting is fun. You get to hang out and chat.
00:42:45
Speaker
It's pretty low pressure. You're going to create great content anyway. It's a win-win. I think that's a really awesome strategy. We're seeing more and more of that pop up now. Works well. I've done it many times. We called it content-based networking at Sweetfish. James wrote a book on it. It was fantastic. A lot of our customers were doing exactly that.
00:43:10
Speaker
You know what I'm surprised I haven't seen a lot is people using podcasts to launch more audio books, especially if they're not, they're less interested in selling books, but they want to get the concept out there. Um, I'm probably going to be doing this with a client soon where he's just going to read his book and I'll be on the back end producing. And we're just going to put it out there as a podcast might as well be a video podcast. Cause some people watch people reading books. It's a thing on YouTube. So it'll be there to be bubble. You can, most people just listen to it on Apple or whatever, but they can watch it there, watch them reading it.
00:43:38
Speaker
How does that work? How does that work as far as copyright goes on YouTube? Do they, do they get copyright tucked down? Oh, it's his book. Okay. It's his book. Yeah. It's not other people's book. I mean, you could, that's like some, you could make probably a business podcast where it's like uncopyrighted business books or business books that are old enough that they're past the copyright, which there's many that are actually like classics, like scientific advertising. You could just read that, you know, I think put it up there as a podcast and just do a chapter, a chapter a week or something.
00:44:08
Speaker
I mean, you mentioned the running one before the show. I thought that was pretty novel. The guy that uploads different beats to run to. I also find that there's all these like sleep podcasts, podcasts that are meant for you to put you to sleep. And one of them I think is like that. He goes back to like content that is not copyrighted anymore.
Creative Uses and the Future of Zencaster
00:44:31
Speaker
And he reads them, but he intentionally reads it very slow like this. And it's just reading old, old classic stories and then putting you to sleep too, which I thought was pretty novel as well. And he's running ads on Spotify and presumably, you know, making money.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yeah, I had a friend who started one of those sleep ones back before they were really taken off. He did it for himself because he couldn't find any like really long brown noise sound machines. So he just made his own, you know, brought like, it was just called 10 hour sound machine. No loops, no fades. And he put it in the pod Spotify right when Spotify was looking for that content, saw it trending and started amplifying it. He was first, he started getting like a hundred K downloads a month. And then.
00:45:20
Speaker
I don't know if he ever quit his job, but he started having sponsors line up because he just started getting so many downloads. And then, of course, he started investing in more than just brown noise. He went into all the different types of noises and sound effects and all that kind of stuff because early traction, man, it can hit. Yeah, it's funny how creative people get with it.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yep. Well, Josh, thanks so much for joining me today. I had a lot of fun learning about the inside and outside of a Zen caster and I'm excited about where you guys are going in the future. Awesome Dan. Thank you for the invite. Let's do it anytime.