Exploring the Future of Podcasting in the Metaverse w/ Tom Rossi, Co-Founder of Buzzsprout

Ever dreamt of hosting your own podcast? How about a live podcast show in the Metaverse? Join us as Tom Rossi, co-founder of the innovative podcast platform Buzzsprout, comes to experience the Killer Bee Studios Metaverse podcast firsthand. This could be a whole new approach for future podcasters. Tom shares his journey from coding in the mid-90s to becoming a key player in the podcasting world and building an easy-to-use platform serving churches, volunteers, and podcasters.

Let's face it, podcasting is hard work but, oh, so rewarding! We unpack the realities of this world, from the futility of chasing downloads as a success metric to the power of engaging conversations that extend beyond any numerical value. Hear about a friend who discovered the unique value a podcast can bring, even if it garners no downloads, as she interviews authors and cultivates invaluable discussions. We also dove into the potential of a podcast as an expert platform to attract clients and the power the smartphone wields in making content globally accessible in just a few hours.

The podcasting world is complex, flooded with opportunities and challenges. We sift through this landscape, discussing the emergence of platforms like Anchor and how it has sparked debates on the number of existing podcasts. We also discussed the open system of podcasting versus the closed system of YouTube and how the pandemic has influenced the industry. Tom offers invaluable advice for aspiring podcasters, emphasizing the importance of content over numbers. He assures us that even a podcast with low download counts can be a success if it resonates with the right person. So, brace yourself for a captivating discussion on podcasting's ins and outs!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Well, thanks for joining me on today's podcast replay from the Killer B Studios. Today, our guest is Tom Rossi. Tom is one of the co-founders of the podcast platform called Buzzsprout. So Tom joined us for two reasons. I met him at a podcast conference it was called PodFest and when we met he asked me what sets your podcast apart from others? And I told him that, well, we record our podcast in front of a live audience in the metaverse. Well, tom wanted to see what that was all about, so we invited him to come join us. So he's joined us tonight to first, to experience what it's like to do a live show in the metaverse, and then, secondly, he answered questions and gave us insights about podcasting and we discussed what this might look like in the future, connecting podcasting with the virtual reality world and the metaverse. So with that, let's go ahead and dive on in.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Hello friends, my name is Rick Partey and welcome to the Killer B Studio. Grab a seat, invite your friends and get ready to experience all the buzz of Killer B Studio. And don't forget to like the world. That's very important.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Hey everybody, thanks for joining Tonight. I'm running into a table. I mean that's kind of awkward, right. I mean you guys see me tripping over my table with all my legs there in him. So, wow, I got some more applause there. Keep it coming. Keep it coming. This is great. I'm so glad you guys are all here tonight. Welcome to the Killer B Studio. Our guest tonight is Tom Rossi. He is the maker of Buzzsprout, so if you listen to podcasts or you're thinking about starting a podcast, this is a great guy to talk to. So with that, let's go ahead and bring him up. Can you cue the guest music please? All right, can you please rain him with some confetti? Tom Rossi, come on out. Hey, thanks for joining us here at the Killer B Studio. Oh see, he stepped on the wah-wah button too. That's great.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Hey thanks for joining us. Tom, Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 3: 2:10

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 2:11

Yeah, it was a long drive for you, right, it was a long drive yeah. So Tom is you guys. As I was saying, he's the. Is that the right way to say it? You're the maker of Buzzsprout. Is that the right?

Speaker 3: 2:22

way to Like co-founder the technical co-founder. So I wrote almost all the code. Why?

Speaker 1: 2:27

don't you take about 30 seconds, tom, and tell us a little bit about you, who you are and what the audience know? A little bit more about you and about 30 seconds.

Speaker 3: 2:35

Yeah, so my name's Tom and I started the company in the mid-90s to just really I wanted to be on the front edge of technology and had come across a website in the old days of AOL and dial up and I was like man, this thing is, this thing is going to change everything. So I wanted to start a company and get into technology, and that eventually led us into building software products, and one of the products that we built is a product called Buzzsprout, and it's a podcast hosting platform and it's the one that I spend most of my time on these days. We have two products that we currently maintain, but we have separate teams for each of the different products. Okay, so Buzzsprout is the one that we spend most of our time on.

Speaker 1: 3:22

Nice, so okay. So let me ask you how did you, let's see, how did you get into the podcast and business? How did all this start? So we started back in the 90s, right?

Speaker 3: 3:33

Yeah Well, so back in the 90s we started just building software, and at the time it was just there wasn't even a name for the industry, right. So it was kind of evolving, and so as it evolved, we kind of fell into the bucket of being web developers, so building web-based applications. And the first product that we ever built was a content management tool, and it was geared towards campus ministries. So this is before Facebook and any type of way to just put up pictures that you want to share with your friends and schedules and calendars and things like that blogs and so that was a product that we built. In probably 2000, 2001, I think.

Speaker 3: 4:19

We started building it and that led us to start working with churches, because it was originally designed for campus ministries like campus crusade or young life groups that were working on college campuses. But those campus pastors went on to become pastors and so then they started using the same product, but now they were using it for their church and they were like well, how do I get my sermons online? Well, that's a podcast. And so it was very fortunate for us that we got into podcasting early on. I mean, this was probably 2006,. 2007 is when we started and when we launched Buzzsprout, we immediately got into the world of like. Podcasting is just so much bigger than just sermons being posted by churches, so now we host probably we have over a hundred thousand active podcasters that are currently hosted on Buzzsprout.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Wow, and I tell you what like. So I met Tom at the podcast. There's a podcast conference and we've been using Buzzsprout for a while now and I absolutely love the platform. So if you guys are ever thinking like, well, it's starting to podcast could be very, very overwhelming, like you don't know the tech side of it, their platform makes it so easy I mean so easy especially going to submit it to all the other platforms. I have to say one of the things I love about your platform is is the way that it can adjust the audio like the. What is that called? It's like the magic mastering. The magic mastering yes, that right there is genius. It saves so much time.

Speaker 3: 5:59

You know. So you've got your origins in helping. You know you're helping churches, which are typically volunteers. They're you know they come and go, and so it really can't be that difficult. You have to make it simple so that somebody else can come in and take over, and so we've always built Buzzsprout to make it as simple as possible so that you're not spending your time in the tech, right. You're spending your time working on the content, right, recording great content, putting together great stories or whatever it is that you've got for your, for your content, for your podcast, and we don't want you to have to learn how to do the mastering of your audio or the encoding, things like that. And so Buzzsprout has always worked to make those things as simple as possible. Anytime that we can, you know, take out complexity and make it easier for people. That's. That's something that you'll see when you use Buzzsprout.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Well, and I tell you what, what I love about it guys too, like you guys, you guys definitely have done it and I'm not going to spend too much time just talking about all the tech side of it.

Speaker 1: 6:55

I know for me, when we launched this studio like I've talked to people here and people that come here all the time know this wasn't originally what this studio is built for. It was built for us to do digital consulting and do videos. But the more we started having really long I mean we have good conversations here with people from all around the world that normally we wouldn't sit across from. I mean I would never have thought I would have one of the co-founders here of Buzzsprout sitting across the seat talking to me about podcasting and in the metaverse. But when we started doing it, we realized, like this, the platform which we took those recordings wasn't really people don't want to watch the cartoons as much like when watch the replays. But I'm like we have great content and podcast platform is great for that because people will listen, they'll come back, they'll finish it later. And in here, like, how much do people spend on equipment for podcasting?

Speaker 3: 7:46

So I'll tell you you can spend as much as you want, but you can also spend as little as you want. And so there was a there was a podcaster that I was I was speaking to gosh, this was years ago and podcasting was just starting to really explode. And so this guy had a real popular blog and back in the old days, blogs blogs were a great way to build an audience and you had people that would follow your blog and, and so what you could do is you could kind of turn that audience into a podcast audience. So he did a great job. He had a real popular blog, he launched a podcast and he was one of the most popular podcasts out there.

Speaker 3: 8:44

And I was talking to him one day and at the time, I mean, there wasn't a lot of companies like Buzzsprout. Now we definitely have competitors. There's other people that are really making podcasting easy. There's some great products that are out there, but in the old days there really wasn't Like we really were the easiest way in town. There was nobody that could. That was near.

Speaker 3: 9:02

So anyways, I'm talking to him and he's like, and I'm saying, these other people make podcasting so complicated. It's like they put up walls because they want to sell you coaching or they want to sell you. You know why you need them as a consultant and Buzzsprout, like we took all that complexity out. So, anyways, I'm talking to him and he's like, well, you know, I don't tell anybody this, but I actually just record it on my phone with the earbuds. And he, I was like there's nothing wrong with that, but he was embarrassed, he didn't want anybody to know because he was one of the most popular podcasters. We were at a conference and he's one of the speakers and one of the most popular podcasters and he didn't want anybody to know. But he was literally recording one of the best podcasts on just his phone with earbuds.

Speaker 3: 9:53

And I think you don't have to spend a lot of money to be able. It's more about the content and it's more about being consistent, not just recording three episodes and then waiting for somebody to show up with a million dollar check right, like. It's something you really got to work towards to build that audience, to be consistent, to be. You know, we call them a consistent content creator, and so if you're creating good content, the microphone doesn't matter. But a lot of times too, we also see when somebody it's so intimidating. Right Like this is great because you've got people to interact with but there's a lot of podcasters.

Speaker 3: 10:33

they go into a dark room, they turn on a microphone and they start talking, and it's really intimidating. There's a fear that I'm going to put this out there to the world and it's going to get rejected. Nobody's going to listen, nobody's going to say anything, and so what happens a lot of times is they will use excuses to stop them from launching that first episode.

Speaker 3: 10:59

So for example, you will go to multiple conferences and you'll see the same people and they still haven't launched the podcast. Literally, they're going to conferences but they haven't launched their podcast yet. And you talk to them and it's like well, no, you know, the audio just didn't sound quite right. I'm going to try this new setup with this new mixer and this new microphone, and that's not the issue, right.

Speaker 3: 11:23

The issue is, you just got to get over the hump. You got to get those first couple episodes out there and start to get going, and then you can always spend more money on equipment later. But I always tell people, worry about the content, worry about what is it you're going to talk about? How are you going to reach your audience? How are you going to get them to come in to find out what it is that you're talking about?

Speaker 1: 11:43

Yeah, so let me ask you, tom, I know you know so much about podcast. And two, one of the things that for me when we got started was it was disappointing to see how many downloads you're getting there first, like do you what do you say? What can we people expect when they start a podcast? Do you have any kind of hey? These are things. That kind of just kind of grounds you in this. So you don't give up, because, I mean, we're in a world that people look at these numbers.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Right, we were wanting to like people are expecting overnight success and you're going to have like I actually literally had a company reach out to me and they said we want to do a podcast, we have a podcast, but we want to get it to. I think it was, I think it was 10,000 downloads a month. And I'm like how many downloads are you getting right now? You know right. And they're like yeah, we're getting like around, maybe like around 500 a month. I'm like that's okay, we need to talk about this, because that doesn't just happen overnight. Like 10,000 downloads, that's a lot of work.

Speaker 3: 12:41

Yeah, I think that it's a real issue, because so much of podcasting especially right now, when it's such a hot thing, such a hot topic, and so people are always talking about downloads, as if that's the only measurement of success for your podcast is how many downloads you get. But I mean, for the longest time it wasn't. For the longest time, podcasting was about. What is the message that you want to get out to the world? Right, I mean, I told you about churches, right? Like a church wants to get a message out to the world, how many downloads makes it worthwhile? And so, if, whatever it is that you want to talk about, whatever, whatever that topic is this burning that makes you want to start a podcast? You really have to ask yourself, like, how many downloads do I need? Like, if I filled a room you hear it all the time where people like, well, I only get 50 downloads, is that good? Well, if you got a room filled with 50 people that were listening?

Speaker 3: 13:38

to you would that be good, like, and if you go, no, that's not good. Well then, what are you talking about? Why'd you start a podcast? You know, and so I think it's. It's it's hard.

Speaker 3: 13:48

There's a lot of people that are getting into podcasting because they think it's a way to make money quickly or to become popular, but it's just, it's hard, it's a lot of work, and so if it's not something that you love, or if it's not, if you don't actually enjoy the craft of the podcast, of creating the content, of interviewing guests or whatever the you know the format of your show is, then you're probably not going to make it.

Speaker 3: 14:15

You're you're probably not going to make it as a podcaster because it's just too hard to keep being consistent over the time, you know, to be able to hit the kind of download numbers you're looking at Typically when you're reading these articles. Who are writing them? They're the companies that are spending all kinds of money on advertising and the only way that they see value in a podcast is how much they can sell an ad for. Well, there's so many other ways to get value out of your podcast. I was, I was talking to a friend of mine who has a podcast and she's an author and she just wanted to start a podcast and interview other authors. Well, she doesn't care if anybody downloads the podcast at all, because she's having conversations. She's literally having hour-long conversations with authors that she's looking up to right.

Speaker 3: 15:07

Yeah she's asking them questions like how did you get into it? Tell me your story, how would I, how could I? What advice would you give somebody like me to be in? So she has these incredible Conversations and so I was talking to her like like well, how is it going? Do you feel like it's successful? She's like I don't care if anybody downloads it, because you know I have these incredible opportunities. It's led to relationships with these authors where now she can actually reach out to them to talk to them about her agent and you know, being able to. You don't get what's it called like on the front, the front of a book, where you get quotes and things like that. Yeah, so I'm just saying there's so many different ways to get value out of a podcast. That downloads is just one measurement and Fortunately it's it's the one that gets the most attention where I feel like it's. It's a metric, but it's not the most important metric.

Speaker 1: 15:56

That's good, that's really good. I love that you point that out. Love that, that's so. That was a long answer. No, that was a good answer there.

Speaker 1: 16:04

I think that was good answer because we we can get so focused, like even with that person that we were talking to. I was like, well, if you get 500 downloads on an episode, or 500, 500 downloads a month, you got to figure out, okay, instead of just how much money you're gonna have to dump into it, let's talk about how many episodes are you putting out. If you're getting a hundred downloads per episode, then if you want to get to ten thousand, how many episodes do you need to be putting out? And is it realistic? Can you put out that many episodes in a week? Right, because it's not. Because, because again, you'll be chasing those numbers and you'll burn yourself out because you're trying to chase that. In some ways, it could be like a vanity metric. Instead of I'm doing this, I love that, I love that story. I'm doing this because I want to sit across from other authors that I look up to that I can learn from. That's winning for me. That's that changes everything.

Speaker 3: 16:50

I talked to a Podcaster and he gave me this quote, which I love. He said my podcast is my business card. And what he was saying is I Put out a podcast and anyone who listens to it finds out about who I am as a consultant, and then all it takes is one person To to hire him as a consultant and he's paid for the whole year.

Speaker 3: 17:13

Right, he's paid for the whole year of his podcast hosting, of his microphone, of the time that he spent. So it establishes him as an expert and so now it's his business card. So now people go and they download his podcast and it's about a very niche topic, but as people download it and listen, they go oh my gosh, this guy must be an expert. He's got a podcast. They reach out, they hire him as a consultant to help him with the specific thing.

Speaker 3: 17:36

I mean, there's so many different ways to To evaluate the success of a podcast, and so I think it's. It's really asking that question of what does success look like For you as you're getting into podcasting and then? And then you can answer the question of whether or not it's realistic or not, unless they're, unless, for example, like that blogger I was telling you about. Well, he already had a following. So could you pivot that following into a podcast downloads? Absolutely, that's, but that's different. But if somebody's like man, if I don't get 10,000 downloads in a month, I'm out. Well, okay, don't waste your time, it's not gonna happen overnight, I agree.

Speaker 1: 18:13

That's a good point too, because I don't know, tom, if I told you when we first met. I don't know if I told you, but we, like my team, we work in, like the, the Christian radio broadcasts industry, so we work with the radio industry and some of those people we've been trying to encourage. Do you need to be getting podcasts out there? Get your personalities doing their shows on podcast, because right now you have the megaphone of all the airways, the broadcast, all your listeners To download our podcast. You have a. You have a huge advantage To actually bring in those followers to where a normal podcast takes a lot of time and effort to be building up.

Speaker 3: 18:46

When in the history of the world could you, with just the phone that's in your pocket, record an hour long a Piece of content and have it literally out to the entire world in Hours?

Speaker 4: 19:01

you know what I mean like it's just it's.

Speaker 3: 19:03

We live in an amazing time. There's no, there's nothing that can shut it down. There's nothing that can stop it right now, like the podcasting is totally open. There's, there's, it's just there's. We live in an incredible time. There's a credible opportunity for anybody that has a message that they want to get out to the world. Yes, and so I think that that's that's what really excites us, that's what got us into podcasting, and I think that's what you know we still love about the podcasting industry.

Speaker 1: 19:28

Tom, when we first met. I Met, I met Tom at a podcast conference it was called pod fest over here in Orlando, and when I met him you asked me a question. He said so tell me, like, what's different about Europe, what's different about your podcast? And and I said well, we record our podcast in the metaverse in front of a live audience. So I want to go back to that for a second and ask you what? What was your initial thoughts when I said that, oh, I mean I thought you're crazy.

Speaker 3: 19:58

I mean when, when you told, when you told me that I mean I've told multiple people the story now too, because Immediately in my mind I think metaverse, what a joke like this is, like this is. I mean I think it will get there.

Speaker 3: 20:12

I you know in my mind, I would have given it credibility that it's, it's gonna get there at some at some point, but I didn't. I had no idea. I had no idea that this all existed. And so talking to you and your ability to not just it's not gimmicky, it's. It's about making connections with real people and being able to do that in a way that removes, literally removes physical barriers. There's just no, there's nothing to stop people from being able to meet together, and so you really, you know, educated me on what's possible and the things that are happening in the metaverse, and so then that just totally got me fired up. That's why I was so excited to be able to be on the show and do this.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Like from your experience right now, what would you say? Your thoughts are of the metaverse right now, like in horizons. You know we're still working on things, but connection I mean.

Speaker 3: 21:01

I think the future is now right. Like the, I figured eventually we're gonna get to a place where you'd be able to do this, but I had no idea how far along it's come. Like this is exactly it being able to go in and interact with people. You know, especially right now where I feel like there's so much loneliness that's come as a result of COVID, and you know this is a way to connect with real people and they're doing a great job and you know they're only gonna get better at making it feel, you know, like more, like a real connection. Even the. You know being able to do high fives and thumbs up and you know things like that. That's only gonna get better to provide more connection points to you know make it feel more physical.

Speaker 4: 21:48

Hey, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here, Tom.

Speaker 3: 21:52

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4: 21:53

Of course. So last year we heard a speaker who was talking about podcasting and he said that a lot of people feel like it's peaked, like there's no more space for new creators. Basically is what people will say and someone actually just said that to Brian, I think, yesterday and so this speaker, he gave an illustration and he said imagine you're in a big room, like this, for instance, and you're in the corner and you're looking at the wall just right where your eyes hit the wall. He said that's where podcasting is right now, but if you turn around and you look at all the rest of the room, that's the potential of podcasting and the reach that it could have. What do you think about that?

Speaker 3: 22:37

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean it depends on where you look. The question of how many podcasts there are, it's actually a point of contention with a lot of people because, yeah, because a service launched in maybe 2019 called Anchor, which eventually got bought out by Spotify, and it's a way for you to basically download the app and you click record and, next thing, you know quote you have a podcast, right, but you only record one time, you don't? It's not really a podcast, and so, depending on where you look, you'll see numbers as high as four million, right? Well, typically, when you see that number, they're including all of those anchor podcasts, but the number is more likely to be more likely like about two million. That two million number includes some of the anchor podcasts, but only the ones that have 10 or more episodes, and they continue. They've published an episode in the last, like year, something like that. So it's somewhere between, let's just say, two and four million. Well, think about YouTube. Youtube has, I wanna say, about 30 to 40 million channels, wow. So, just comparing YouTube to podcasting, you could grow 10 times as big as it is now and you still are smaller than how big YouTube is. And podcasting is open, as opposed to YouTube, which is limited, right, because it's a closed system, whereas podcasting, anybody could do it tomorrow, and so I think it's a little bit.

Speaker 3: 24:13

So my answer to anybody that always oh well, I missed the opportunity on podcasting because it's already peaked. It already happened, that's. It's just not true Now. And one thing that also happened was we saw during the pandemic, tons of people came into podcasting, both as listeners and as podcasters. They came in but then a lot of them left because they saw how hard it was. Right. It's difficult to again to be that consistent content creator. Not just anybody can come up with two or three topics to talk about, but to be able to be that consistent content creator and develop that long-term relationship with your listeners, that takes a lot of time, and so we saw a lot of people come into podcasting and then leave.

Speaker 3: 24:56

Now the listeners the good thing is, the listeners that came into podcasting, they stuck around. Yes, that makes sense. And so what we've seen is podcast listenership continues to grow, but the number of podcasts we saw go up and then come back down, and so and now it's going back up as we've kind of cleared out all of the pandemic podcasts that started. Oh, interesting. So I think there's plenty of opportunity. I think it's like we were talking about before if you're a target audience, if you need to have millions of downloads, well you're in a very small niche, right Like there's only a small number of podcasts that are getting it those kind of massive numbers, but there are thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of podcasts. 99% of the podcasts that are out there don't get millions of downloads, and so it's a great opportunity. It's a great opportunity for somebody to get into it, and they just should avoid comparing themselves to the Joe Rogans, the large podcasts yeah, that's good Office ladies.

Speaker 4: 26:04

Yeah, yeah, the office ladies.

Speaker 1: 26:06

You had to put that pitch out there, right? Yeah, I didn't get to share my favorite podcast, so I thought I'll just tell it right here yeah, okay, thank you, tom, sure sure.

Speaker 1: 26:17

I love that you pointed that out too, because if the guy that was sharing with you about it's his business card, that's a great way to look at it, because if you're business, if you're trying to build, you wanna become a thought leader, maybe to go do public speaking, anything like that. It takes the right one person, the right person listening to your podcast, to say, you know what, I wanna have that person out, I wanna have them out to come speak at our event and they're gonna pay you for that. And some of those speaking gigs, I mean I can anywhere from 10,000, they way higher than that that. I've seen that. Okay, well, I put out a podcast, but I only have, you know, whatever, 500 downloads, but it only takes one.

Speaker 3: 26:57

This guy that I was talking to. He had courses that you could buy. You could hire him individually as a consultant. He's published books, so he's got there's all different ways for him to use that business card to do other things. There's a woman here in Jacksonville that has a podcast and it's like about logistics, business logistics, and it's so niche and it doesn't get a lot of downloads but for her it's moved her career forward because people, including the people that she works with, now look to her as an expert in business logistics because she has this show where she does these deep dives and sometimes she brings on guests. And so how do you quantify the success of that podcast? You know it doesn't take even thousands of downloads for her to make that a valuable proposition.

Speaker 1: 27:52

There was a time that we were doing live I know this isn't podcasting, but my team, we were doing live videos, live streams on LinkedIn, and I told our team I'm like, look, there's only about 15 to 20 people coming on here live. I was like is this work doing? And as soon as I said that it wasn't, but probably a few weeks later, I got a message from somebody on LinkedIn and said hey, I just want to thank you for what you're doing. It was one view Was an entire broadcasting class at a university watching and I was like how many people in your class? He's like, you know, about 20 or 30.

Speaker 1: 28:26

I'm like women, 20 or 30 people, or that was one view was actually 20 or 30 people. Yeah, so it's like you never know how it's being listened to, how many people are listening at that time. I mean, if you think about it, one download how many people sitting in a car listening to that? Yeah, you just, you just don't know. But like he says, stay focused on what your purpose is behind it and tie it in with other things.

Speaker 2: 28:47

Hi, I'm one of those anchor people that eventually gave up on their podcast after 10 episodes, but it's always still great, but you got the 10.

Speaker 3: 28:55

That's great. It's right out to 10. I did get the 10.

Speaker 2: 28:59

I started with the, the Oscar Meyer Hot dog popsicle story, which was which was intriguing, and then I ended with the Queen's death. I think it was a good one. My question mostly I, you know, I'm here, you there's all different types, or did not types, but reasons why people get into podcasting or whatnot. I try getting into myself because I thought, well, you know, I might as well give it a shot. And then I got into here and found a little bit more success. In a way, I'd love to get back in more podcasts. But what would you say what? What reason should people get into podcast for? Because, like you said, if you're getting into it for those 10,000, you know downloads a month and you're trying to make money overnight. That's not what exactly it's for. It can, of course it has, but why should a regular person looking to share either opinion or whatnot, why should they get into podcasting? Should it be the money or for the passion?

Speaker 3: 29:57

I think it's so the blogger that I told you about for him it was, it was for money, right, like he had a. He had a following on his blog and blogs were kind of going away and Podcasting was starting to emerge and so it was a way for him to continue to make money. Oh, and actually, now that I think about it, he made money off of selling courses, so he was selling courses from his blog and now when he did his podcast, now he's selling courses, right. So it wasn't necessarily passion, except that the course that he taught was something that he was passionate about, right. So you know, it's kind of hard to separate. I think if you're not passionate about the subject, it's gonna be hard to make money, right, but it is possible that you're passionate about something and you don't make money.

Speaker 3: 30:46

Yeah, so another, another woman that I I I didn't actually talk to the woman. I talked to the hospital here in Jacksonville. We have a Hospital and I was meeting with somebody in their communications department and they were telling me about a woman whose husband got diagnosed with a disease and it was a very rare disease and she couldn't find any information to help her with like all of the requirements of this disease. Like she was gonna have to change her husband's diet, she was gonna have to do all these things to take care of him, and so what she did was she started a podcast for caretakers of people with this disease, and she immediately connected with people all over the world who had a loved one that was diagnosed with this disease, and so, like she's obviously she's passionate about it. But even again, if she only gets one download, she was just trying to help one other person Avoid the pain that she went through in learning how, like the doctor is gonna say this, but don't do this, like, do this instead, or ask them about this, and you know, make sure you're you're doing these things and these things, and so Everybody's different and how it might fit.

Speaker 3: 31:54

Don't let the corporate world Tell you how podcasting needs to be, because what they're gonna do is they're gonna tell you podcasting is it's all about downloads and ads, and that's just not true. That's what they want you to think, because it's the worst way to To get value out of your podcast. That's what they want you to believe, but that's not. It's just not true. It's a way I'm not saying it's not, you know, possible. It's just not. It's just not the way I think that most people should get into it. No, it's good.

Speaker 2: 32:25

Thank you so much for that answer. I appreciate it, tom no problem.

Speaker 1: 32:29

Thank you. All right, let's bring up a Wall Street wizard. Wall Street wizard, come on up. Hey, it's good seeing you, man. It's good seeing you here.

Speaker 5: 32:38

How are you?

Speaker 1: 32:39

How are?

Speaker 5: 32:39

you, man. Good good, good good. All right, so I'm also one of those folks that started a podcast during the pandemic and Just let it go. It is hard, hard, hard work. And I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I have a friend who works at Stitcher and she, she works in business development and here's what I learned, and here and then I'll I'll give you the question. So I learned, first of all, it is really hard work, like real, really hard work, and Even with help of people like, say, a company like Stitcher, it's still hard work.

Speaker 5: 33:24

Here's what I wanted to know, tom. I Love the work part. I love the, the talking, the interviewing, the, the Scheduling guests, all of that. The thing that really got me was the back end, the admit, I call it the administrative and operations part of it, the production, the adding in music and the editing and all of that. I Don't know, killer B, I might have completely lost my mind because I'm actually doing a podcast for the first time tomorrow and he. So we build a podcast studio and here our first live audience podcast podcast is tomorrow. Maybe I lost my mind, I'll see what happens, but I wanted. My question, tom, is are there companies that I could hire, where I can say hey look, this is what I want to do, here's my format, here's what works. Can I pay someone to do all of the administrative back in, support the marketing and all of that for me?

Speaker 3: 34:35

Thanks, Sure sure, I think there's there different competencies you're talking about. When you're talking about marketing the editing and even the mixing of the audio, like putting in music and things like that Um, there's tons of people that can do that. You can get them off of fiverr, right, like you can find them that are out there. But when you're talking about marketing, that's just as different as marketing a product, right?

Speaker 3: 34:59

Like finding somebody that understands how to market it and that's probably not something that you could just Delegate. I would be very skeptical if I would be very careful when you get into that, because there are as more people have gotten into podcasting and more people have struggled with podcasting, like how do I get more people to download? There's all these people that will sell you downloads. Oh, I can get you. I can get you 10,000 downloads next week. That's why I'm asking you.

Speaker 5: 35:25

Tom.

Speaker 4: 35:25

I figured you screened some of these calls.

Speaker 5: 35:28

No.

Speaker 3: 35:30

So I'd like to see if you could help me find one stop shop yeah no, I don't think it existed. It's a magic bullet, right like it, just doesn't. It doesn't exist because if it existed, they wouldn't be helping you with your podcast. They would be doing their own right. If they knew the magic beans for marketing, then for marketing their podcast, they would have their own podcast and that's what they would be doing. I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 5: 35:54

I'll just say all the things they said.

Speaker 3: 35:55

I say all that yeah, and I totally I could be 100 wrong. I have not all of these companies that I've seen that have popped up that have tried to say that they were gonna help podcasters grow their audience. Oh man, it just well. How about?

Speaker 5: 36:12

I've seen so much abuse. Okay, so Tom, let's take that away. Then what if I just want someone to help me with the administration, the editing, the all of that? Just take away the marketing.

Speaker 3: 36:23

Tons of tons of people, good people, that can do that yeah, but but the challenge?

Speaker 5: 36:28

I've used Fiverr and I will tell you, sometimes Fiverr can be a hit or miss. Oh yeah, if you haven't used Fiverr before.

Speaker 3: 36:35

Well, so what you want to do is you want to. You want to like whenever you get those misses, you go get the next one until you get a hit. Then, once you get a hit, you stick with that person you know, but there's also companies, there's, companies, there's companies that'll do it as well.

Speaker 3: 36:49

I would recommend do do all that you can to reduce the those. The requirement to be able to do those things so I'll give you a perfect example um is that you might hold yourself to a standard that's so high that the only way you're going to be able to get that that podcast out is it's got to be, you know, perfect. And so in order to do that, you're spending all your time trying to edit out every um. You know every delay to be able to get it out to the world and that's not why people are listening. They really want the content and so if you focus on the content, you can always go back later and later when you start to get some success. When you start to, you know be able to afford to be able to bring in other people to help. That's when you can start.

Speaker 3: 37:31

You know worrying about things like, like music. It's easy to do music at the beginning, music at the end. It's you know it's all the fading or the cuts, and you know you're doing an interview and there's street noises in the background, like. If you hold yourself to that standard, you might make it so difficult that you give up versus just focusing on the content. Do really compelling content and ask your audience like hey, as people are listening to it, what is it that you like, what do you want to hear more of? And I think that can really help you kind of refine. You know what it is that you want to spend your time on the most valuable things, and the most valuable things are not typically the editing yeah, and I think I've even heard people say that they don't like a podcast because the podcast says it's been edited too much.

Speaker 1: 38:16

It doesn't feel like a podcast. Uh, wall street just give you. Uh, there are companies out there that that will like like Thomas, saying that will actually do the editing for you, like even with us with our podcast. You know we're a marketing company, so I mean in here we're Killer B studio has been in real life, we're Killer B marketing, so you can look us up killerbmarketingcom.

Speaker 1: 38:36

But one of the things that we've done to help streamline is Arcane, who's up up in the up in the green room up there, or the control booth you guys can't see behind the clock. He's recording right now. He's recording all this audio and what I love about Buzzsprout's platform is that you know we'll go places. We'll go places, even a soapstone. We recorded a podcast on soapstone for a bonus episode. Uh, but their mics are different, so when people are further away it's quieter. We upload it to your platform. All that editing that you have to usually do to try to adjust the volumes to make sure it's the same level their platform does in a matter of seconds and they do an amazing job and it's just like just a few dollars extra a month to get that. So we pay for that.

Speaker 1: 39:16

And then when it comes to marketing, you know we build it, the topics around what people are searching. But then you have to think about the show notes. It's like oh wait, a minute, show notes, you gotta put a lot of that transcripts, transcripts. You know we do. Now we actually have a whole. We've been using AI services to generate content for a year and a half and so, like chat gbt I was just talking to somebody about this, somebody about this chat gbt isn't brand new. We've been using it for not chat gbt but other service for a year and a half. We actually have written a, a what we they call it a recipe, but it's basically a template for our show notes. So we pop in things and AI is like and it generates it, we proof it, edit it, tweak it, put it on there. It's done in like matter of minutes. Things are changing so some of that heavy load can be taken off. It's just understanding.

Speaker 3: 40:01

You know what to be looking for when you go to optimize it and let me say this too, for for Wall Street as well um, um, when, when you look at how people grow podcasts, the, the strategy that continues to be the one uh, that just goes. I, I feel like, is it's the most fun and the most successful is to find other like-minded podcasts and work together. So you find another podcast that's in your area and you say, hey, man, you come on my show, I go on your show, and it's, it's a win. Win because you both increase your audience, you both get exposure to each other's audience.

Speaker 3: 40:40

And some people go as far to create networks where they'll they'll, they'll have four or five podcasts and they'll, they'll group them all together and they'll, they'll, they'll do promotions together, they'll do all kinds of. They'll share an editor, they'll share you know somebody to be able to do the producing. And so I I think there's, there's other ways, um, of growing your podcast too, that are really effective that don't involve you know somebody just charging you to go out and, you know, get you clicks well, I wanted to at least ask a question to kind of tie in both sides of what we're doing here there.

Speaker 2: 41:13

I'm all around the community, a lot of places, and there are a ton of people that are doing their podcasts here in horizon, in the metaverse and VR, because they have found that not only can they get people in one area to record a lot easier on these headsets, but they also found that there are multiple people out there in this platform even alone. That how all the skills that, when put together, can create a podcast team. So I guess my question is what do you think about the development of being able to make podcasts in in like horizon or virtual reality and using that as a tool to put out a podcast so that, you know, brings people together and whatnot?

Speaker 3: 41:55

yeah, yeah, no, I love it. I think it's great. Like I was saying before, one of the obstacles to podcasting is, you know, it's typically done literally. A lot of people do it in a closet where they have all the sound and you know the the sound dampening but you miss that connection with people, and so for some people like myself, I really thrive on that being able to see an audience to be able to, to connect with them. Some people they like it, they like the dark and speaking into the void, so I think it provides different ways for different personalities to be able to record great content. At the end of the day, it's about the content. It's about how engaging the content can be, because people like to listen to podcasts for a reason, and so it's got to be content that's engaging with them, and so, however, you can create that engaging content. That's what's most important great, wonderful.

Speaker 1: 42:48

I appreciate it before we wrap up we're gonna get ready to wrap up. I would love Tom just to close out with what is something like.

Speaker 3: 42:55

What is a takeaway you hope people would take away from today uh, I mean, I hope they would be encouraged to, to pursue the things that give them life. Right, if that's something that gives you life. Uh, you know, talking about content, creating, creating content there there's, there's something that you're passionate about, but maybe you got disenchanted by the numbers or you got beat down because you know somebody put these unrealistic expectations on you. I would hope that you would just be encouraged to just go for it that's good.

Speaker 1: 43:27

That's good. I love that. Well. Hey, thanks for tuning into today's podcast episode, if you liked loved today's episode.

Speaker 4: 43:35

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