Ben Shapiro - CEO & Co-Founder of I Hear Everything | Using Podcasts To Grow Your Business

Welcome to success story the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the blue wire podcast network as well as the HubSpot podcast network. Now the HubSpot podcast network has incredible shows like the hustle daily. It's hosted by Zachary Crockett, Jacob Cohen, Rob Litterst and Juliet Bennett Ryla. Now the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of a reverent offbeat and informative takes on business tech and news and it happens daily. So if you want to stay up to date on the latest and greatest and some of these topics are interesting to you then you're going to love the hustle daily topics like Amazon's grocery strategy. The rise of the ugly shoe economy is AI the secret to love and America's sleep deficit problem. So if these are topics you want to get into and you love hearing up-to-date content whenever you wake up in the morning go listen to the hustle day daily wherever you listen to your podcast. Today my guest is Ben Shapiro. He is the founder and CEO of I hear everything and the host of the Martek podcast podcast. It's also in the HubSpot podcast network. Now Ben is a brand development and marketing strategy specialist. He left a career at eBay to become an entrepreneur that has run a bootstrap startup multiple marketing teams at early stage VC backed companies as well as an independent consulting and content business. Expert he specializes in helping growth stage companies understand how to identify the overlap with corporate identity and customer needs to build an effective marketing strategy. So he's built a business focused on content as a service and podcasts as a service. He's obviously done it for his own podcast. He's built now three shows total including the Martek podcast and now this is something that he actually builds out for organizations that are better looking to marry up performance marketing and brand marketing to effectively target reach and convert their customers. So we spoke about his transition as VP marketing into entrepreneur how the failures that he experienced as a VP of marketing at an early stage company translated into what he now does for organizations and then it was basically after that a master class in podcasting we spoke about how he chooses different guests we spoke about how he targets his listeners we spoke about everything from his recording process. All the way through to his editing and distribution process why he gets and how we can get 100% of that audience to listen to the podcast versus many podcasts that perhaps your audience only listens to 50% of it we spoke about long form podcast versus short form podcast we spoke about daily podcasts. We spoke about his team how he scaled this team how he finds talent all the different roles they fill the automations that he's built in to help basically build his podcast and media empire we spoke about growing the show we spoke about audience behavior audience avatars editing at scale bashing episodes driving traffic using podcasts listeners as an audience that you can now retarget and sell to so more data driven be to be podcasting so basically everything podcasting from building your show and getting it off the ground all the way through to how do you use podcasts to actually turn listeners into paying customers at scale so a ton of great podcasting lessons plus some great entrepreneurial lessons as Ben has built out an incredible business from the ground up leveraging technology tools resources that has allowed him to stay relatively nimble and not require any sort of outside capital to build up this business. So let's jump right into it. This is Ben Shapiro. He is the founder of I hear everything as well as the host of the Martek podcast. I failed as a marketer. I worked early in my career to get to the point where I could take on the VP of marketing at a venture backed early stage startup role and I finally got there and I did everything wrong. Just like I did when I had my first startup and I you know it's part of the lessons is you learn everything you're not supposed to do and that's why when venture capitalists are looking for good people do invest in their looking for somebody that's run to companies already. So you get the first screw up out of the way you know second one you have some success in the third one hopefully you really take off and so my first time running a marketing department I relied way too much on. Writing the performance marketing social media wave and I totally forgot all the things that I had learned early in my career which was you know how do you figure out who your customers are and how do you build content that they find interesting so you could build a relationship without having to constantly pay for user acquisition and so You know that's my first screw up inevitably led to what I'm doing today. Hopefully that's a good cold open for you. It's great. No but and then but but at an early stage startup I want to understand why you consider that a screw up because for a for a VP marketing and an early stage startup to not focus on performance marketing. Like I feel like you're going to get fired tomorrow because you need you need both of them and honestly that's what our business model is now is you need. I will call it awareness and demand generation right you need both sides of the coin if you're early stage you need to build content and develop you know some traction with Google get your SEO going. Build your audience whatever the channel you're going to use that's going to get people gravitating to your content to exposure to your brand all those things that build your core actual audience and retain them and nurture them and keep in front of them. So when they're in market they remember you you need all of that stuff you need awareness before you can sell. But you need the demand generation tools to get somebody into your funnel with an idea of converting them and monetizing them and so. The mistake that I made was I was all Facebook all the time I was sitting there doing the creative myself managing the campaigns we didn't spend a lot of money on agencies we didn't have a big enough team for me to step back and say all right. I'm going to hand off what's the revenue driver and so at an early stage company that's always the challenge is you need to cultivate these organic growth channels while keeping your business afloat and getting your first you know ten hundred thousand customers depending on your business model. Through your paid channels and your personal or professional network so you know I lost sight of the building the organic piece and so after I had worked at this startup for your year and a half whatever it was you know the founder came back the CEO came back and he was getting pressure from the venture capital company saying quick lower your LTV you know or sorry raise your LTV lower your pack and that you can't do that quickly right you need to. Cultivate channels that bring in organic growth so you're not paying for the customers so your pack is lower and the highest LTV customers are the ones who come to organically through content and so quick you know move away from performance marketing we'll take six months to a year to cultivate those channels and so I basically caught got caught flat footed all I had done for a year was bye bye bye bye bye bye and then when we hit that. I was a round or be round funding you know milestone whatever it is for each company it's a little different when you get to that point where you're like okay we're going to course correct and we're not just going to buy to prove that there is product market fit but now we need to start focusing on unit economics you can't do that in a second you need six months to a year I didn't have six months to a year and the next thing you know. I didn't like them they didn't like me in the relationships I heard and I was you know now I'm a talking head a couple steps in between there but that's how it became podcaster so so why did you jump into this so you said you were you said the the version of your business now of of creating all this content and also what you do for other businesses that was sort of birthed in your understanding of building relationships so yeah how did you understand the podcasting was the way that you wanted to go and you didn't just want to turn into a. A brand specialist or a customer success of retention specialist you very very targeted i'm a marketer by trade some more of a generalist and a strategist and an individual channel expert i'm also extroverted so I really feel things and and and kind of live on the outside as opposed to the inside and so when I had this job that I'd work so hard to get and then it didn't go well. You know there was the emotional personal part of my career that I needed to feel through and reconsider so I was hurt was frustrated it was upset and it was either they were going to fire me or I was going to walk out the door I still don't note to this day whether I quitter was fired but it's a little of both. And so I walked away and said i'm going to take three months off i've never really taken three months off from working and i'm going to go figure out what I want to do with my life or at least what my next job is going to be. And after three days of sitting at home I had rebuilt my personal website benjshap.com. To basically be an online resume which was basically the homepage for my consulting practice and so I launched that website on a Friday and that Monday I launched the website on a Thursday got a note from a friend on Friday saying I need to hire you as a consultant and I was in the office on Monday so I took you know three days off in between. Jobs even though I plan on taking three months off but they were short term projects it doesn't count right it wasn't a full time w two job with health care and equity and all the stuff the money was better than what I was making right my wife had health care I guess I still probably had cobra or you know I was sort of covered in terms of all of the like life. Things you need yeah and I started taking on short term projects one short term project led to the next led to the next led to some process and three years later I looked up and I was running a six figure consulting business and I had done it for years so I just never hit that point where the short term projects dried up and I built you know outreach and processes and use marketing technology to to scale the business but I. After three years of being an independent marketing consultant all the sudden I was walking around saying I do brand development and marketing strategy help people figure out the overlap between who they are and who their customers are and then how do you cultivate marketing channels to get them off the ground stuff that I was inherently good at because I had experience in performance marketing but new brand marketing as well. And so after three years I came to the realization that I was building a consulting network off the back of my personal network of consulting business off the back of my personal network so I was reaching out to the 1500 contacts that I had on LinkedIn talking them about what I was doing and how I was helping other companies that were in similar stages and found enough work to survive. But after three years I was running out of what's that did you enjoy it did you enjoy jumping into this or was this like I'm just curious because most people I loved it. Yeah, I loved it. I love the independence. I love the autonomy. I felt I had more respect in my career by me being the product people were buying the sounds bad buying me right not buying a marketer. They were hiring Ben and so you know call me egotistical that felt good and when the projects went well it felt like I was doing well. And so I enjoyed coming in and and having respect and authority and autonomy as opposed to all of the pressure from being an in house marketing, you know, VP that was hoping that the equity that I was going to earn in four years from now would be worth something. And so I felt I was able to realize the work I was doing monetarily faster. I got more credit. I enjoyed running a business. I enjoyed growing it building my own products thinking about my own branding. And then I wanted to expand. And so after three years I started the MarTech podcast because I needed to reach more people. So my my clients became early and growth stage marketing companies. And so I created the MarTech podcast to interview the people I wanted to have as my customers not thinking that the audience would grow very quickly, you know, I didn't have any any plans on being, you know, web famous or pod famous or whatever it is. I definitely wasn't thinking about being a B2B influencer, which is, you know, part of what my business is now. I was just thinking I was going to go interview people I wanted to be my clients and help promote a piece of content for them to build a relationship. And that was going to be your sales strategy. Basically, you're using podcasts as a sales strategy. Yeah, exactly. And truthfully, it was an experiment that went completely wrong. So I, I wanted to get a couple months into building the podcast, get some traction to then show people that I had credibility. Look how good this podcast is. I've been doing it for three months. We've got 15 episodes and a little traction. And what ended up happening was I realized that an individual episode was being consumed an hour long episode. So people were consuming 25% of it. So I cut the episodes I was recording in half. And then people were consuming like 55% of it. So the shorter I made the episodes, the higher percentage people were consuming them. And then when I cut them in half again, instead of it going to like 75% it was, you know, almost all of the episodes. So I found this format where I was able to interview someone and get, you know, somewhere between two to five pieces of content out of an interview and all of a sudden, the audience was listening to the entire episode. And since we had five episodes instead of two a week now we had a daily podcast. There was more organic growth. There was more virality because the guests were sharing the content because I was producing more for them. And the audience grew faster. So I looked up after three months and said, God, I've got like 3,500 downloads a month and we're growing at like a 30% clip. I'm just going to keep doing this for another six months. And somebody told me I can make more than beer money when I get to 10,000 downloads a month. That doesn't seem like it's that far away. I'm going to half consult and half do this podcast thing. And after 11 months, we had 10,000 downloads a month. And I said, I'm not going to do the lead generation thing. I was going to do a riddle originally. I'm not going to try to sell to my guests. I'm going to see if I can sell sponsorships to people that want to reach marketers. And I sold $25,000 of inventory in the first 30 days. And the next thing, you know, I was off to the races. And then we were really good beer money. It's great beer money at that point. I don't drink that much beer anymore. So I mean, that's like a lifetime supply beer for me. And that that also have the added effect of creating a nice inbound funnel for your business. Did you start to get leads from that as well for some of the consulting things? Or did you never really explore that I pushed them away when I went to the sponsorship model. And this is probably a mistake, but I put a lot of chips in the same basket of like I'm doing this thing. I'm going to go see if I could sell some sponsorships. And so I got some, you know, interest in consulting work. But mostly what I was doing was starting to off board my consulting clients saying I'm doing this podcast. It's taking half of my time. I had an anchor client that paid the bills that took half my time. And all the other relationships I started to basically put them on ice and the life of them wrap them up, hand them off to do the podcast, figuring I would be able to monetize the podcast. And what I was trying to do originally was diversify my revenue streams. I'll make $100,000 a year if I'm lucky as a podcast host. I'll make $100,000 a year from this anchor client. I'll split it 50 50. And then the podcast revenue just outpaced all my consulting revenue. And so what I did was I transitioned the anchor client to being a sponsor of the second podcast I created the voices of search podcast. And then I had two daily shows. And and was able to basically leverage the same monetization model, which was helping us monetize at a faster rate than the industry average. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode express VPN. Now express VPN is my preferred VPN of choice. I use it. I've had all my sponsors, but I actually have used express VPN for years now. In the online privacy, safety and security world, they are the best. And I think we can all get behind how important it is to have safety security and privacy online. Not all VPNs are built the same, which is why when you're choosing a VPN to protect yourself, you have to choose a VPN you trust. These are the reasons why I trust express VPN. The first thing they don't do is they do not log your activity online. Lots of cheap or free VPNs make money by advertising or selling your data to advertisers express VPN doesn't do this. So they've developed a technology is called trusted server. That makes their VPN servers incapable of storing any data at all. The second thing they do well is speed. So express VPN uses something called lightweight. This is a VPN protocol. They engineer to make user speeds faster than ever. You've tried VPNs before I tried VPNs before where you try and load a site. You try and watch a movie. It doesn't work. It doesn't work at all or it doesn't work well. Express VPN solves for this. So it feels like you're browsing the internet without a VPN, even though you are. And lastly, it's extremely user friendly to set up. So it's not complicated. You load up the app, you press connect and you're online, you're protected and you're safe. So extremely user friendly, which is important for people that just want an easy browsing experience. That's what a VPN should be. It shouldn't be technical. I always recommend protecting yourself with a VPN express VPN and success story we partnered up. They put together a special link express VPN dot com slash success story. And if you go to express VPN dot com slash success story, you'll get an extra three months free on a one year package. So that's express VPN dot com slash success story, three months free on a one year package express VPN dot com slash success story, go visit express VPN dot com slash success story to learn more. So, so to break that down, how you structured your podcast format is extremely short form. So you're 15, you're 15 minutes basically. And then you, you take this long form episode, long for piece of content. And you're not only using that as like for your content marketing. You're using that to create this daily show. I don't think a lot of people that I know have actually adopted your strategy. I think a lot of people do more of the long form strategy to do like a show per week or something like that. Is this the way that you feel that all podcasts should be built out because like I'm taking notes and now I'm thinking through like how the hell do I turn my show into a daily show without doing daily hour long conversations with different people. So curious about people starting a show. Is this the format they want to go for? Is this just because you have a certain niche that you're trying to serve? I think it depends on what you're talking about and the audience that you're trying to profile trying to reach. I think it also depends on who the host is. Your show is great. And it's longer form content than mine. Don't change a thing. I love your show. I appreciate that. But I mean it works. But I mean for somebody starting out. This is this is a conversation for somebody starting out because then you have you know you have the opposite of the spectrum we're talking about this before the Joe Rogan's at the three hours and like the the audience obviously is there too. So then the question becomes so how do you understand your audience? How do you best serve them? This is a classic marketing problem now and you figured out and I'm curious because is it because your podcast is highly actionable like sort of bites of of things that they can do tomorrow versus I really want to get to know someone so I'm going to have a three hour conversation with them. And I like understand the inner workings of their mind. Maybe they maybe the business leader doesn't care about that. Maybe that's why it works. Yeah. So I always think of our podcast and the reason why the format works is because the content is dense. And so for people to understand you know the ins and outs of choosing a CDP that meets the needs of their business. There's a lot of acronyms. There's a lot of word salad flying around and it's hard to sort of comprehend all of it. So after 15 minutes or brains just like I don't get it. Listening to something that's a little bit more narrative driven like what's the story. How did somebody go through the hurdles. I would consider your podcast to be more entertaining because people are telling their life stories and how they became successful. And so I think that you know it's easier for people to listen to that format of content. You know it's kind of like well what's better a short or a long YouTube video or a short or a long blog post well it depends what you're talking about right. If we're talking about math textbooks you know you need to give me one line at a time and let me think about it. I'm not that smart. You know some people can can digest that format quickly. So I do think that it all comes down to understanding who your customers are who you're trying to reach with the content. What the purpose of it is and that should dictate the format for us marketing technology can be complicated and dense. And after 15 minutes I work in marketing technology. I don't want to listen to it for more than 15 minutes. So you know it's hard to get more out of that sort of 15 minute time. Primarily that's my philosophy and why we've created our show. So what we do is we break down dense content into short form so people can digest it daily and start to build the overall understanding of the genre and the topic. We do it for marketing. We do it for organic growth you know SEO or just launch our third show the revenue generator which is you know revops and combining marketing and product and sales. So you know there's a lot of complication in mastering these types of business mediums and so we try to make it easy and digestible and we keep it light and we keep it fun. But you know if I was having an interesting conversation with somebody that was meant to last an hour and I cut it off after 15 minutes I think the audience would be annoyed. So I think it's depends on what you're what you're really trying to accomplish. When you started this you mentioned that you started cutting that podcast down in time and you noticed that you were getting sort of a longer listening session so you know that you cut it down to 30 minutes to listen to 50%. You cut it down to 15 minutes to listen to 90 to 100% did you do any additional work to figure out who that audience was. Did you you have like an audience avatar that you nailed down like this person is at this type of company this type of industry this type of job role. It's really hard to figure out in podcasting who your audience is and there's some data that we look at now to get a better proxy. At a high level I think that our audience are marketers that are interested in learning about how to use technology to grow their business and improve their career. So inherently built into that we're reaching marketers and that's kind of as profiled as we get. People have asked me you know what split of it is B2V versus B2C I say we cover both of them because we talk about both B2B and B2C what industries are they in we talk about all. You know e-commerce and media and sass and you know so I don't think that we have an industry that is very specific you know probably not a lot of manufacturing. But you know marketers or marketers or marketers there. I find it interesting the only reason I bring that up is because you optimize your show a very different way than what I've heard JLD like John Lee Doomass and entrepreneurs on fire. He says that he has such like a specific cost audience avatar that you can tell you like their name their hobbies like when they drive to work and how they listen to the show. I just think it's interesting how different people approach like I don't know the best word to call the best the best way to call it like a show optimization differently. I can go into more detail about who a marketer is right he's his audience I would guess is entrepreneurs. So I would guess that most entrepreneurs are you know 25 to 40 probably closer to 35 probably skew heavily male hopefully that's changing more and more. You know more hustle culture than chill work so they're getting to work on the earlier side and not listen to the podcast late at night you know I like I could make up a profile I'm guessing what his is and and you know for marketers. And I think that when I say marketers I don't mean entrepreneurs who are responsible for marketing I mean people that have careers in marketing and to hire marketers you know those are funded businesses to mature companies. Yeah and so the profile skews a little older we see that from our data in chartable where like our average ages in the 30s or 40s the average income. You know we kind of see this pile of household income that centers around $125,000 let's call those marketing operators. So that's your mid career 20s to early 30s and then we get a big spike in $200,000 of income or more so that's probably your 35 to 45 year olds you know and so like I have personas and customer profiles based on the data that we can get out of podcasting. But I can't tell you what type of music they listen to you know like I it doesn't get that sophisticated I'm not making up a profile based on what I think of marketers but honestly it's the people that when I go to a marketing conference yeah I'm looking around that so you know like I know they're sent as I've been in the room with them. So now you're you're what three shows now I think you just launched our third show actually so and I want to know that's incredibly fascinating too like you have you have you are the most processed driven operator I think I've met outside of me because I also obsess over how to figure out how to everything that I do down the line all the way to the distribution like it has to be like written out codify like everything has to be perfect for me so that I don't lose my mind but you're taking it to an extreme because you're you're the the amount of stuff that you produce is absolutely insane for and I know how big your team is too so break it down so well here's what happened right I we started the MarTech podcast we launched the voices search podcast I built this sort of sponsorship model but I was doing most of the work manually and so my team wasn't very big I had Todd who's been working with me you know as a contractor since basically day one and he started running the content operations that turned into Todd you write the show notes I don't want to write the show notes and then it was the publishing getting stuff into Libson and then art 19 and then it was while we're doing ads to somebody's got to flight the ads so I I built all this documentation and training materials to hand it to Todd and then he became too busy because we were doing two shows and we started doing other activities that we said hey let's go get freelancers and contractors around the world take advantage of the economics of geography and start documenting what we're doing so we can hand it to somebody else. And then let's build automation so we can let the team that we're building know when they're responsible for executing a given task and so you know it was kind of like we did everything manually for a year and then I started off boarding it to Todd and then he started bringing on other people and we realized that we needed business automation we went from air table to Monday dot com to sort of build in more automation rules. And then last year we basically spent the entire year other than you know running the sponsorship models of producing the content blowing out all of the automation. And so everything from which guests do we reach out to how do we evaluate who the guests are how do we invite them who's sending the emails to make sure that they know when to show up and schedule the content how do we publish the content who's doing the show notes the quotes publishing social media who's sending the stats to the guest after the downloads after the episodes have been published so people know how many times they've been downloaded like all of those tasks are handled by a writer a publisher. A communications manager we have a list builder on staff and then you know we basically hired duplicate teams. So we've got one team for voices search one team from our tech podcast and we were able to duplicate the automation we were using from one show to the next. And so at the beginning of this year or the end of last year I said hey I've got this automation system on rails I can spin out another show tomorrow but the biggest problem that I have is my personal bandwidth it takes a lot of energy and effort to be the host of a show as I'm sure you know yeah. And I didn't want to do a third one but I wanted my business to keep growing because we needed more inventory to sell more sponsorships. So what we did was we said well let's go package our marketing automation our content automation we'll call it content as a service and we will go sell to you know an enterprise hey we will create a daily podcast for you. You're going to provide us with the host so we're going to build influence for someone in your organization we're going to manage the entire process the host only has to show up for three hours a week to record two interviews and do some content planning. And so in three hours a week you get a daily podcast with social media a newsletter and we have the ability to grab all the data from who's listening to the podcast and retarget it and we can drive not only that awareness that I talked about before but the demand generation as well. And so out of that now all of a sudden we were looking around saying hey we've got a content as a service business and then that's what led to the recent rebrand was it wasn't really my consulting practice anymore we didn't name to describe what we were doing. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode factor now it's a new year I'm busy I always always always I'm running out of time so when it comes to meals I don't want to wait in line at a grocery store I don't want to even have to drive if I don't have to and I definitely don't want to spend a ton of time cooking in the kitchen but now I don't have to meal plan or prep thanks to factor factor makes it easy for me to eat clean 24 seven. They deliver fresh never frozen prepared meals that are so delicious you won't believe they're actually good for you factor saves time by delivering chef crafted meals directly to my door eliminating the hassle of grocery shopping meal prep but most importantly eliminating the hassle of cleaning and if 27 meal options every single week so I can guarantee you're not going to be bored. They also offer tons of great nutritional additions they have vegan and veggie meals they have cold pressed juices smoothies energy bites plant based bars extra protein veggie sides and what really whatever you want to keep you fueled and focused all through the day if you want to try out factor they set up a special code just for success story podcast listeners so head over to go dot factor 75 dot com slash plans. That is go dot factor 75 dot com slash plans use the code success 120 that's going to give you 120 dollars off your first five weeks of meals remember that is code success 120 at go dot factor 75 dot com slash plans for 120 dollars off. Alright so no I think the only thing that you have to worry about when you're building this out is is talent is because copying pace and a team you already have so that you can scale it up. I don't worry about scaling the contractor right there's not that they're not valuable we put a lot of work into finding and training great contractors but there's a huge supply of wage workers. I don't know what the appropriate way to say but you know people that we're paying an hourly wage to do a repetitive task so finding them and sorting through them like we've built in the processes to understand who's good and give them the materials they need to be successful what I worry about is me. And my ability to get out of the company's way to scale right I need to go figure out how to scale monetization which means I need to go find someone to run monetization for us we need to go build out a customer success function and so. The the low wage repetitive task workers I think are easy to find an easy to scale it's the great when we go from three podcasts to 30 and there's that middle level of someone that needs to go manage the. Operations and customer success and revenue generation and add sales and marketing that tier of me running my organization that's what keeps me up at night like can I go find that talent and understand what makes them tick and onboard them well enough that they are hungry and motivated to stick around and see the mission all the way through like I think that's my biggest challenge not just. We need another writer the writers are great and they're important but I think we can find those at scale. Just to think through that problem are you trying to as you scale this out are you trying to hire like a jack of all trades generalist to fill that gap just a very experienced like. In house entrepreneur that would take on the sales and the customer success and and everything that you're doing or would you just perhaps. Model out your business differently and then start hiring specific roles so now you have a VP sales and now you have a customer success person and you're going to turn into three people or something like that. Yeah I mean right now I'm I have five roles and so it's carving out the individual roles for somebody to run revenue monetization like that's one role I think customer success is another one right there's somebody who's going to go. Sell the content as figure out how we're going to sell this content as a service business package it up make sure people understand what it is there is somebody that is going to take the sponsors once they've been you know sign the contract and make sure that they're successful and run the campaigns for us those are two different roles. So I think that you know when I think about what my job is it is you know the executive function it is add sales for two of the three shows it is being the podcast host I manage the operators the operations but there's a middle level there so it's basically what I'm doing in operations where I'm not in the day to day content publishing operations there's somebody else there that's reporting up to me saying. You know here's what's happening with operations here's the problem having how should we solve it so basically building in that management level is the next challenge for me is I'm moving now into the executive function and away from being sort of a primary operator. I don't think that I think that you're concerned about it but candidly you already know that you know that you have to do it to grow the business so I would say that people that have grown businesses much larger than yours into the you know the tens of millions like sometimes they still have a hard time. So I think that you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I and for all of the sort of technical challenges that it has, it's got the largest pool of talent. Yeah. And to me, that's what really matters. Good, man. And when you do this, you have to staff up a whole, because you have automations built in, but there's also some people executing. So now you've figured out the ideal person to staff up, and then you just sort of scale out all these different job positions. When you do this mountain of the service, or, you know, do documents hand off, I'm sure there's a better acronym for that process, but, you know, I took the things that I was doing, and I documented and handed it off. And then we automated the notifications of this task needs to be done. Now, when we hire, you know, there's, let's call it, three people per podcast, other than the host, so four people total, I forgot the editor. Five people total for a show, you know, someone can do multiple shows. I'm the host for the Voices of Search podcast and the Martek podcast. I'm not the host for the Revenue Generator podcast, our third show, right? But our writer is writing for two shows. So basically, what we're figuring out is, each individual contractor can basically handle the workload for three shows. Good. And so we already have two, let's call them teams of the four people, I'll exclude the host for now. So there's two teams of four, so we have the capacity for six shows. We're doing three, so I don't have to hire anybody until we get to the sixth show. Now, in reality, when we bring on more shows, we won't have a team operate at capacity, we'll bring on more staff, so we always have capacity to bring on new shows and get people trained on shows that are already up and running and have process and other team members that can rely on. But that's basically the model that we're building out now is we go find companies that want to build awareness and demand at the same time. We'll help them build influence, so we'll have a member of their team be our host. We've got the process already figured out, and then that helps us produce the content without taking a lot of work on their end. And the output of that is not only a daily podcast, so they're out there nurturing, being visible, staying in front, building thought leadership, owning the conversation. But then we take the data that is spun out of the podcast, the social media, the newsletter, the website, and we build retargeting direct response campaigns to feed into their funnel. And so that's kind of the other piece of the puzzle for us. It's not just where a podcast production shop, there's lots of it, is that we can convert podcasts into actual site visitors that have listened to content and know your brand. Amazing. And I want to understand a little bit more of your mindset and your posture towards monetization, because obviously this whole exercise and building out all these different shows is how you're choosing to build your business. So the question I'm asking is, why would you not just grow that one show, grow that audience, and then maybe it's just easier to sell an advertising spot against that larger audience. Maybe it's, I guess now, you know, actually, as you describe it, I kind of get it, because now you have opportunity to monetize and do like a B2B sales play, but then ultimately, so you can sell that way, but then you can also sell against each audience for each podcast, you can sell advertiser spots or sponsor slots as well. I'm gonna answer the question, you're dancing around. Yes, please, yes. Why aren't you focusing on the MarTech podcast? That show is doing well. And all of a sudden you're spinning out three shows. Why do this? So a couple different reasons. One, there are only so many people interested in marketing and technology. So there is a ceiling on the size of that show. We have not reached it, but it's a niche audience. I don't pretend that the MarTech podcast is going to be a 10 million download a month show. It's not, right? It's going to be multiple hundreds of thousands of people listening to the show, hopefully, at scale. Right now we're tens of thousands of people listening to the show, we get 60 to 90,000 downloads a month. That's tens of thousands of people. So we'll fill a basketball arena with people that are interested in marketing and technology. Maybe someday it'll be a football stadium. It's not an entire state worth of people. For us to continue to expand, we either try to grow the MarTech industry. That's going to be challenging for us to do. We can pick off other verticals. That's the model that we've chosen. So we went MarTech and SEO. And the revenue generation industry, we could do sales. We can do all sorts of other verticals and build this podcast network that generally owns the B2B business influencer space. That's probably where we're going to land with our podcast network. It's easy for us because we built this automation to spin out new shows, get them to scale and get them to monetization quickly. So my rationale for not focusing on the MarTech podcast, I am focused on the MarTech podcast. It's the show we're trying to grow. The most in the fastest and the biggest of our properties. I just don't pretend that the MarTech podcast is going to be the Bill Simmons podcast or Joe Rogan or, heck, I'm not even pretending it's going to be success stories with Scott Clary, you know. It's going to be there. It's going to be there. Don't you worry, you're not that far off. You're doing pretty good. You're doing pretty good. No, but because we were able to monetize at 10X with the industry averages, I don't need the MarTech podcast to be a step level function larger for it to monetize enough to merit me doing it. So I'd rather have each podcast make 150,000 to $500,000 and have 10 of them than to have one podcast that I hope maxes out and gets to a million dollars of revenue. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode ExpressVPN. Now, ExpressVPN is my preferred VPN of choice. I use it, I've had all my sponsors, but I actually have used ExpressVPN for years now. In the online privacy, safety, and security world, they are the best. And I think we can all get behind how important it is to have safety, security, and privacy online. Not all VPNs are built the same, which is why when you're choosing a VPN to protect yourself, you have to choose a VPN you trust. These are the reasons why I trust ExpressVPN. The first thing they don't do is they do not log your activity online. Lots of cheap or free VPNs make money by advertising or selling your data to advertisers. ExpressVPN doesn't do this. So they've developed a technology it's called trusted server. That makes their VPN servers incapable of storing any data at all. The second thing they do well is speed. So ExpressVPN uses something called lightweight. This is a VPN protocol they engineer to make user speeds faster than ever. You've tried VPNs before. I've tried VPNs before where you try and load a site, you try and watch a movie, it doesn't work. It doesn't work at all or it doesn't work well. ExpressVPN solves for this. So it feels like you're browsing the internet without a VPN even though you are. And lastly, it's extremely user friendly to set up. So it's not complicated. You load up the app, you press connect, and you're online, you're protected, and you're safe. So extremely user friendly, which is important for people that just want an easy browsing experience. That's what a VPN should be. It shouldn't be technical. I always recommend protecting yourself with a VPN. ExpressVPN and success story, we partnered up. They put together a special link, expressvpn.com slash success story. And if you go to expressvpn.com slash success story, you'll get an extra three months free on a one year package. So that's expressvpn.com slash success story, three months free on a one year package, expressvpn.com slash success story, go visit expressvpn.com slash success story to learn more. And how did you do that? How did you 10X the average advertiser spend? Because that's also very interesting. The industry standard is selling podcast advertisements advertising on a CPM basis, which is great for the advertiser and even better for the agencies. But the problem with that is not good for me and you. Right as the podcaster is the publisher, I built the MarTech podcast, which in it's 11 months I mentioned hit 10,000 downloads. So there was, I don't know, three, four thousand, five, six thousand people that were listening to it. So I've got a room of 5,000 marketers that make $200,000 a year. And an agency wants me to sell the advertising in inventory for that. Am I doing it right? 250 bucks a month? Who about? Maybe it's 2500 bucks. Maybe I'm missing a zero, but either way I can't. I like it. I'd say a 35 CPM. How many podcasts does it take to figure out what the CPM is at least two? Yeah. Moral of the story is it's not enough to pay San Francisco rent. So I'm spending half of my time. And if it's 2500 bucks a month, I'm making $30,000 a year from my podcast. I can't do that with half my time. Now I'm making $60,000 a year with all of my time. I need multiple six figures to be able to afford living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm not doing this project for that amount of money. So how do I figure out how to scale the monetization without relying on sort of the industry standard of agencies coming to podcasts and saying, I want to buy your inventory on the cheap. We have to figure out other ways to provide value and go direct to the people that are interested in leveraging your audience. And so what we did was we've got five products. One, Advertorial Content. We invite the people that are sponsoring our podcasts to be guests on the show. And we are very upfront about, hey, this person is a sponsor of the podcast, but guess what, we're not doing a sales pitch. We are just giving them more air time to build thought leadership and expertise. So Advertorial Sponsor gets five episodes that are 15 minutes each instead of an invited guest who gets two. Now we've got a week's worth of thematic content. So success stories week on the MarTech podcast with Scott Clary, a sponsor of the MarTech podcast. Once we have that piece of Advertorial content, we can do content syndication. So we take the piece of content and we syndicate it outside of our existing audience. So we are marketing that content, not just to our existing audience, but we're going out and finding people that look like our listeners. And we're saying here's a great piece of content you should listen to it. It's a win-win for both parties. They get additional exposure. They're paying for our marketing because we're going and finding people outside of our audience. Third, the audio advertising. Right, everybody kind of knows, hopefully knows how this medium works. You put an ad into a podcast and people pay you for it. We sell on a weekly or a monthly basis and it's a fixed flat fee. It's not based on the number of impressions that we serve. We have a benchmark. We serve 75 to 125,000 impressions a month. And we charge, I don't remember what the rate is now, 8,000 bucks a month or something like that. The last piece is what differentiates us. So we have the ability to suck the data out of the podcasts. The IP address gets resolved into a mobile app ID which allows us to target the households that are listening to a given piece of content that are exposed to a given ad or just have listened to our show as a whole. And so because we can figure out who's listening to our content, we can do two things. One, GDPR compliant, CCPA compliant. We can share access to the audiences through social media channels. So I could take my first party data, the people that are listening to my podcast. I could put it into Facebook, create an audience and I could share that audience with the sponsor of the podcast because they're a contributor in creating the content. So they're marketing to their audience as well because they are a creator of the content. So we can share access which means that the people that are our sponsors are able to retarget the people that were exposed to their ads or listen to their content. And on the flip side, we can also create look-alike audiences from the people who listen to the content and then do direct response marketing that drives traffic from our listeners through Facebook, through Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever it is. We create basically direct response campaigns that use the seed data that we've got from the podcast listeners to drive traffic to the funnel and an offer from our sponsors. Long-winded way of saying, we're just not putting up an ad and saying, I hope people heard you and I hope they get to your website because that's what the CPM model works out to be. You want to buy some airtime? I'll talk about you for 30 seconds. Thanks, goodbye. We are building the story, sharing the content, advertising a specific offer to build awareness, giving people access to promote content and services to the people that heard their content, and we're taking that offer that our sponsors are putting together and we are putting it in front of not only the people that heard it, but a look-like audience to drive traffic and adoption of that offer. So that, instead of being $2,500, is a $10,000 to $20,000 a month sponsorship, which is why we're 10x the average podcast in terms of the monetization. Now, how did you scale that sales effort? Because now that's the offer, but you still have to go outbound. So tips for people that say they do have an offer, they probably won't be as complex as yours day one, but say they still want to skip the minimum and skip the broker or the agency and they want to go to their clients. What's your sales strategy? Are you using something like an Apollo or something like that, or are you just hiring outsource sales reps? It's actually something that we are in the midst of renovating. So when we started doing this four years ago, we went through the, I mean, where the MarTech podcast. So we went and looked at Scott Brinker's list of 8,000 MarTech companies and we said, we're going to email 10 of these people who are running the marketing department at these companies introducing ourselves a week. And we're four years in and we're almost at the end of that list because it's a 8,000 company list at this point. And so it has not been very scientific in terms of who we're reaching out to. Now, the email copy is pretty good. Our response rates are good. We built lots of templates, so I don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting when people respond. So 90% of the time when somebody responds to the templatized email, I have a templatized response that answers their question. And so that means I'm able to document, process, and off board most of that work. So somebody else is sending the initial outreach campaigns as a four email drip sequence. When the responses come back, I've got a VA that is sending the templatized response and if they don't understand what the person's asking or if they aren't sure, we don't have the right template, then it goes into my inbox and I'm writing a manual response. So that's kind of how we scale load catch. You have a very low tech sales at sales strategy. You're not constantly prospecting. You're going like your response rate high. You're not running response outbound on autopilot ongoing. No, it's also not great right now. It's deteriorated over the years where it was a really good, well-targeted cutting edge system four years ago and we've been kind of running the playbook. And honestly, what happened was we're less reliant on finding individual sponsors. So I'll use round numbers here. Let's say that the average sponsorship is a $10,000 sponsorship. Instead of looking for $12,000, $10,000 sponsorships, we have two ad spots. There's the presenting sponsorship, which will sell for $150,000. And that's half of the inventory. It's the first placement in every podcast. These are not the actual numbers. I'm just trying to use round numbers. And then there's the $10,000 to $20,000 sponsorships that we're selling. And so because we've got this presenting sponsorship relationship upspot podcast network, remember for the MarTech podcast, we had one for the Voices of Search podcast for years. And then the revenue generator podcast, the company that's providing us with the host LeanData is the presenting sponsor of the podcast. And so basically we're able to make the $100,000 checks for these presenting sponsor relationships. And then it takes the pressure off of finding $12,000 to $20,000 sponsorships. So honestly, we've let our sponsorship model, the marketing campaign model deteriorate a little because we've been cultivating the sponsorship relationships and building out the content as a service business so we can find more $100,000 checks and not have to rely on 10 to $20,000 checks. So you've built this incredible network. Now, where do you want to take it going forward? Do you want to build out other mediums that you can eventually sell as part of this package? Would you go into other formats that aren't podcasts or is this something that you just want to scale up and have 20 different podcasts? I think that there's vertical and horizontal expansion on the horizon for us. I think the model is we find a presenting sponsor in a vertical that we're not already working at. So we'll go find somebody who wants to own the sales tech podcast instead of the Mar tech podcast and that's $100,000 a year payment, right? So we're already monetizing the podcast from day one because we're going to build awareness for that company and build data for them to do demand, Jen. That gives us the excess inventory to then go sell the secondary sponsorships, the marketing campaign, the monthly sponsorships. So we make $100,000, $150,000 a year from the presenting sponsorship and then it opens up somewhere between $120,000 to $250,000 of inventory that we can sell once that show has scaled. So now we're looking at a $500,000 annual potentially and let's call it $300,000 annual revenue opportunity for that show. That to me is the vertical expansion. The horizontal expansion is what we're building out newsletters for each individual property. And with newsletters, we can go and say, hey, do you want to be associated with the newsletter? Give us $500 a month and we'll splash your logo on the newsletter and you can do a piece of advertorial content on the podcast. And so now we're building in another vehicle where there's room for the $500 check, the $10,000 check and the $100,000 check. And so there's different properties, all that create data. And to me, that's the whole idea is one of the different channels that you can use that help build awareness that we can gather data from to help support the overall mission of connecting brands with creators that reach their audience. So I think that there's expansion not just in terms of which verticals are we taking, but also which mediums are we using to reach the audience. And you're so entrenched in this industry, I'm curious. Do you see more businesses turning to mediums like podcasting as a way to connect with their audiences? Do you feel like this is the future of marketing? I think the future of marketing is bridging the gap between what are traditionally the awareness driving marketing channels, podcasting is obviously new and growing incredibly quickly. But you know, YouTube or video streaming on demand, even the old stuff, the TV, the radio, the stuff that you don't normally like, we're going to get you in front of this large audience, hopefully it's targeted, but basically being able to capture the data that comes out of all of those channels and use it to boost and target your performance marketing. So you get this connection between, did you hear about my company? Do you think we're smart to hear is the offer the company has? So to me, that's really the future, that's what our business is centered on is making the connection between both of these channels, the awareness driving channels and the demand gen channels. I think that smart marketers are going to be really good at tying those two things together as opposed to them living in silos. Amazing. Okay. We have absolutely dissected how you built your business. So I appreciate that. That was really, that was really insightful. And I do hope that some marketers can take some inspiration on and how you can marry the two because I really do love the way that you have tied together the awareness plus the performance, because I don't really think I've ever seen somebody do it at the level that you're doing it at. And then turning it into an actual service to be quite honest, I've never really seen it that granular. I feel like even when I speak to marketers, they generally focus on performance. And then after the performance metrics are sort of dialed in, then they can focus on more of the fun stuff. But what you're doing is effectively showing that it doesn't have to be one or the other, it can be both simultaneously. And that's that's essentially what you're building up for companies. It goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, you know, I screwed up because I just focused on the demand gen at that role that you know, my last real job, marketing is both an art and a science, right? So you need to understand all the warm fuzzies of who my customers are, what are their pain points, you know, how do I articulate that I can solve their pain, but having them be aware of it is not enough. You need to put the vehicles to capture their attention and interest and engagement. And that's not only building the awareness, but the demand gen hooks as well. So, you know, there's multiple ways to skin a cat. We're trying to take advantage of sort of this new media industry and bridge the gap between the two of those. If people want to, well, first of all, two things. So I'm going to do a couple of rapid fire questions just to close it out. But, you know, before we trip it, yeah, they're not they're not that stressful. I appreciate that you think that I grill gas and give them the third degree on this, but it's not that bad. So closing thoughts on on where you want to take, like where you actually want to take here everything, where do you want to take in the future, what do you, what do you hope to accomplish? If you were going to look back on your life in 30 years from now, what impact do you want to have on the world of marketing business tech? And then there's a two part question, which everybody hates, but and then all your socials, your website, all that. So impact on the on the world of marketing when you're when you're done and gone in the future. And then where can people reach you? Okay, when I was writing the website after I left my last job, I sat down when the first lines of copy was, are you ready to give your brand of voice? And I was just writing some bullshit copy excuse my language to try to get people to think I was smart and creative. But that's really become the central thesis of my career is I want to help give brands their voice. And that's not just soulless companies talking about how they're going to sell their products or services. It is highlighting the people that work at organizations and helping them understand what their motivation is and connect with their their prospects. So my goal is to help brands cultivate their voice. The second question was just how to get in touch with me. How do we have to get in touch? I know. It all screws people. No, the second part was just how do we get in touch with you? All your socials, all your website? We just relaunched or we just launched this week. I hear everything.com and for the record it's H E A R not H E R E. So I hear everything.com, which is the best way that I can articulate what my company does in a visual format. We've got three podcasts going out, martackpod.com for the martack podcast voices of search.com for the SEO community and the revenue generator podcast, which is revgen pod.com. There's a million different social handles and everything. You could probably find me under Benjish happy and JSA don't look up. Don't look up Benjamin Shapiro. You're not going to do a guy. We're not going to get the call right now, but I'm not him. All right, let's do a couple rapid fire and obviously everything else will be linked up in the show notes. I thought those were the rapid fire questions. Those are not rapid fire. Those are not rapid fire. All right, we'll do it. Biggest challenge that you've had to overcome in your personal or professional life. What was it? How did you overcome it? Biggest challenge I've had to overcome in my personal and professional life or professional. I mean, that's going deep. I was pretty but hurt after leaving the last job. And and I think that professionally speaking, that was the hardest thing that I'd deal with the record. I'd worked for about a decade trying to get this job and then it didn't work out. And so I needed to course correct and do my soul searching. So doubling down on I'm just going to do the things that I do well and focus on my inherent skills without ignoring the things that I need to develop. But you know, be who you are was probably what got me through that tough phase. And fortunately, at the same time, my girlfriend, at the time was, you know, on the verge of becoming my fiancee and is now my wife. And so, you know, I had a good support system and my family and everything there that helped me get through the the challenging times. But we all go through our stuff. Just be yourself. And that's my advice. If you had to pick one person, obviously there's been many, but pick one person has had an incredible impact on your life. Who is that person? What did they teach you? I never had to look for a role model because I always had my dad and my mom as well. But you know, my dad and I are similar in sort of how we think about an approach life. And so, and it's funny, I think about this now that I am a dad and I have two young boys. And so being a good role model, there's no one thing that my dad taught me. It's the whole picture of how to be a good person, how to be a bench. And so that's the easy one to answer of like, who's my role model? And I didn't have to look beyond, you know, the front door to find them. And so being a good parent is, you know, something that we all hopefully aspire to. Very good. If you had to pick a book or podcast, obviously, none of yours, but another book or podcast that's in fact, did you what was it? I'll give you two books, which is funny because I have a podcast or I listen to most stuff, but two books that really had a profound impact on me. And of course, I'm going to blank on their name. John Warlow is the host of built to sell radio, which is a podcast. I think the book was called built to sell. But he wrote a book. Is it? Yeah, it is. It's built to sell as well. It's his book. He's got a couple books. And I think the one that really made an impact on me was built to sell. That was basically about standardization and building a process. And it was in a narrative format. So from a business perspective, that was really impactful for me. And I just, I think he's a great guy and an incredible podcast host, a good writer. So I have a lot respect for John Warlow. Born to run is a book about a tribe in Mexico that are the fastest runners in the world. And basically they run without shoes. And it basically goes into the dynamics and sort of the the reason why people run and how we were able to survive. And I thought that was a fascinating book. It was good because I'm a terribly slow, but enjoy running. And so that was actually an incredible read and also something I've passionate about as well. Amazing. If you can tell you're 20, sorry, what? Let's throw that one in there as well. Why not? Why not? That doesn't count. No, those are both good. Those are, I just Google board or born to run to find the to find the book. And I got the Bruce Springsteen. So they got it too. But I'll have to find the book is those are two books that have never been, have never been brought up on the show before. So I always like when I, like, you get all the base, you get all the basics, you get all the, all the sales books, all the marketing books, all the, all the lean start up to atomic habits, those are all the boring cliches. But I love when you don't say your other guests are boring, but those seem like boring answers. They're they are boring answers. I like books that when you tell me them, like, five minutes after you tell me them, I'm going to go get the money Amazon and that into the shelf. Those are in audio book format, which is probably why they stuck in my head so much because I read them and then I went back and listen to the audio books. Very good. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would it be? Don't drink so much beer, you're going to be fat when you hit 40 good advice. And relax, you'll be fine. And then last question, what does success mean to you? What does success mean to me? I think being successful is a multi faceted prospect. It is being happy doing what you're doing, helping the people around you achieve what their goals are monetary success, making a positive impact on the people that you influence and work with. So I don't know if there's one thing that I think about successful, think about make someone successful, but it's more it's like Jerry McGuire. The the football player and Jerry McGuire talked about the quam. It's the whole package. No, being a success is being happy, being excited when you wake up to go do your job, getting credit for it, feeling like you're validated and you can do the things that you want to do.