94. Building a Dream Team: How to attract and keep top talent with Brenden Mulligan

00:00:00
If you're on my email list or you follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, you may have seen that I made a bit of an announcement a few weeks ago about changes we made in the capture team and what it means for what we at Capsho are focusing on. And that's very much been on my mind lately. Specifically, two themes that have been on my mind lately. Two themes. One is focus.

00:00:22
The second is leverage. Because as I've learned in my very recent journey, you can't effectively do one without the other. Without a clear focus, it's hard to know what and who you need to effectively leverage. And when you don't create the right leverage that is, have the right people in your team, you can very quickly lose focus. And it is these two themes that I wanted to explore further in this conversation.

00:00:47
This is a conversation I had with another software founder that I very much respect, Brenden Mulligan of podpage. And I wanted to share it with you unedited so you could listen in on a very real conversation between two founders and hopefully gain as much as I did. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho. The fastest way to repurpose and market your expert content and this is the Grow My podcast show.

00:01:22
My name is Brenden Mulligan. I'm the founder of Pod Page, which is a way for podcasters to build websites in an incredibly easy way in just a couple of minutes. And besides that, I've done a ton of startups for the last 1520 years. And I've done even more projects that didn't become startups because they were such abysmal failures. And most of the startups I've done have failed also.

00:01:42
But I'm a builder, so I try to find specific problems and attack them. I started in the music space where I built some projects and companies to help musicians with their workflow and then worked with app developers to do the same thing. Sold one of those companies to Google. And so I spent three years working sort of more professionally in product management and product building at a giant company, which is the only time I've really ever done that. And then since then I built podpage.

00:02:09
I built a project in the NFT and crypto space. The common thread that goes through them is I build. So I'm actually the one doing a lot of the programming, at least at the beginning. And I try to find very specific problems that creators are typically. I've tried a few things outside of the Creator world and I just haven't ever been that passionate about it.

00:02:30
But I really love the idea that you can go to a creator who's trying to put something out into the world, and you can reduce their workflow burden in one way or another. So currently with podcasters, I just don't believe you should spend much time thinking about your website. So I built a tool that sort of does everything you could possibly want a website to do. But in other areas, I've tried with different solutions, but always problems on, hey, you're a musician. You should be writing music and touring.

00:02:54
You shouldn't be managing tour dates on 15 different websites or with app developers. We built a bunch of tools like build the app, release the app, then get to serving your customers. Don't worry about managing your reviews on the App Store and all the other stuff that you have to do. That's my common thread. Okay.

00:03:11
I wanted to have a little bit of a different conversation with you today, Brenden, founder to founder. I really want us to have an open, transparent conversation about some of the things that we are struggling with in the present time, because it's great to learn from hindsight is 2020. It's great to learn from our past mistakes, and I'm sure that some of that will come up as well. But it's always hard sometimes to look at now, the now, and what we're doing and how we're thinking about things and try to almost dissect whether the decisions we're about to make or are making will put us on the right track. I find that a really fascinating conversation.

00:03:47
Yeah, 100%. I want to start with a focus for you because as you mentioned, you've done a ton of things. And Podpage, I think, has done phenomenally well, given that you're stretched by way of like, you're actually building, and yet you've been able to get the pod page brand and name out there so effectively. And it just amazes me. So I'd love for you to talk through not only what you did do to create that kind of success, but what now are you focusing on and why?

00:04:20
Sure. To get started, and this does go all the way through to today, is I tried to figure out what problem I wanted to solve, and the podpage concept came up. Actually, that was layered on top of some past experience. I was in the music industry when MySpace was really popular. I was actually working for record labels, and we were spending a lot of money building up our fan base on MySpace.

00:04:42
And so it sounds silly today, and it's dating myself to even mention MySpace, but at the time, there was really no easy way to get music on a website. It was like you needed to hire a development team to do that. And even record labels had to spend tons of money to get music on websites. It sounds so stupid, but when MySpace came out, it was the first place you could literally go and hit an upload button, put a song in and have it play. And so that problem they solved drew all of us and the professionals in the industry to be like, all right, let's invest here.

00:05:14
So we put all this time and money into MySpace. MySpace eventually imploded and it was like losing a fan base, especially for bands that weren't touring and didn't have any other sort of way of connecting. They basically put all their time into this platform. The platform disappeared and they had to start over. And so I lived through that and I actually ended up leaving and building a company around building a website as a band to collect email addresses.

00:05:38
That's really all it did. It did other stuff, but it was like, you just need to have an email list so when you go to different cities, you can tell people that you're there and you can't do that on MySpace anymore. It's not that I think platforms are bad, but I just think that you as creator should have a direct connection to your fans. And so with podcasting, I think it was like a Thursday. I was searching for a friend's podcast and I realized his Google search results were 100% 3rd party platforms.

00:06:01
Now they're great platforms like Apple and Spotify and all the others. But I was just really surprised that he didn't have a place of his own. And so Podpage came from, it literally was like, let me just build you a website using the RSS feed. I think I can make this pretty simple. And so I built like a quick prototype of it and put it up, put it at his domain name.

00:06:19
He immediately ranked because his domain name was, the name of his was he was above Apple and Spotify. And there's so much power in not being on one of those platforms when it comes to search results. And then it was reach out to other podcasters, show it to them, build them a website, like, do the work of building them a website and saying, I don't want you to use this, I just want your feedback. And so from a very early stage it came to, here's the very specific problem that I'm trying to solve and I'm not stepping on a lot of people's feet because I didn't see anyone solving this problem. And then one by one talking to people about it.

00:06:50
And a lot of those people were podcasters, and then a lot of those people also were platforms, like other podcast hosts. And I started reaching out to them, or I very early on Met James Cridlin from Pod News and Dave Jackson from School of Podcasting and people like that. And I would pay. At one point, I paid for some of their consulting hours, and it was, I did it with Daniel from Audacity podcast, too. They all had ways that you could basically buy their time, and I was happy to buy their time because I was like, let me show you this thing I made.

00:07:19
Like, what else is needed? What else should I do with this? And so it was a really good way of doing research and talking to customers early on. And so I really was like, I'm trying to focus here. I'm not trying to build, like, a podcast empire, not trying to build podcast player.

00:07:32
I'm not trying to build a podcast host. I'm not trying to build a blog about it. I'm just trying to say, here's the problem I want to solve. And that kind of focus has both helped on the way of people being comfortable helping me from a very early stage, because they knew that I wasn't trying to compete with them, and also decision making around what to build next or how to grow the company, because it was like, put very plainly, coming from a background in raising venture capital in a prior existence, one of the biggest things you would ask when you raise venture capital, is the market big enough? And is there a willingness to pay?

00:08:05
And how big can this company get? And is there a billion dollar company here? And if I were to be straightforward, I would say, in podcasting in general, except rare exceptions, the answers to all those is, no, it's not a very big market. It's a big market. But when you're talking venture scaled returns, it's not very big.

00:08:22
There's not a high willingness to pay. Most people are just trying to pay for their hosting. So you can't imagine spent charging people tons and tons of money for this. And then from a growth perspective, it's hard to see how you could turn it into a billion dollar business. And so that constraint actually was very helpful because it's like, well, that means I'll never be able to hire a huge team.

00:08:39
I shouldn't try to raise venture capital. I could have spent six months trying to raise venture capital. I didn't even think about that. I was like, no, we need to start charging people for the service we're delivering in venture capital companies, usually it's don't charge at all for a while until you grow. It's all about growth for this, it was all about getting to break even and staying at break even.

00:08:57
I don't know. It's like a different approach that drove a lot of focus. And so it was focused by necessity. Yes. Okay, so let's talk about now, today, because this was a couple of years ago and a lot has changed since then.

00:09:08
Maybe not definitely. The world has, as always, it shifts. And so what's the conversations that you have with yourself around how to keep that focus? Because I'm going to be honest, I think that I'm focusing and I'm actually not. I'm just creating more.

00:09:25
I'm like, oh, this is a great idea. And it's in the guise of, yes, it's going to still meet the need of my particular Hapsovian is who we call them and things like that. But it's actually starting to build more and more complexity. So how do you stay just really disciplined around that? I mean, there's been lots of missteps.

00:09:45
I was actually looking through some of the code the other day. We built an entire feature, this is years ago that took your podcast, turned it into a video version. This is back before everyone was doing video versions of podcasts and took your cover art and you could customize the COVID art. So we built like a canva tool to build cover art and customize it. And then it took your video, it uploaded it to YouTube, and basically every time we imported your stuff, we put it on YouTube for you.

00:10:13
YouTube's the second largest search engine in the world. So it seemed like a really good god. I mean, it was so long ago that we built that and we almost launched. I forget there was some bug with super long videos. So we had to build some code or write some code that would be like, well, if your video is this length, we can't do mean it was pretty close to launching.

00:10:30
And I remember being like, this doesn't really fit with where we are in the workflow. So this helps me a lot. I mean, we also have had hundreds, if not thousands of people ask us to become a podcast host because they're like, I love podpage. Can you just do the podcast hosting thing? Because then you're the only tool I need.

00:10:46
And I'm like, my response from the beginning, from Day Zero has been like, there seem to be a lot of people building podcast hosting services and a really, a lot of really great podcast hosts that solve that problem perfectly well, very well. And I feel like if we were to try to be a podcast host, it would end up being a huge distraction. And at the end of the day, there's people who are doing it better. And so because of that, I exist, or I being podpage this after the show is published. And so I just always go down, okay, I've had a lot of people saying, can you build AI tools like Capsho into podpage?

00:11:22
And my answer is like, it doesn't make sense for me to do that because by the time podpage gets your episode, you already should have written your show notes and done all the things that a tool like Capsho does for you. So maybe I could, there's a reason to maybe take your show and turn it into a blog post because some people like having an episode page and a blog post or social media posts and stuff. I know you all do that, but even that I'm squinting. Like, yeah, there's so many other people who are kind of focusing on that I'd probably be better off just making the templates look better for their website. Right?

00:11:53
So that helps with me because I really do sit in this workflow of like, I don't want to help you before you've published your episode because that's what Buzzsprout and Libsyn and Captivate and all the others should be doing, right? And working with people like you to get that initial metadata loaded. It's a little awkward because they also all have landing pages that are websites, but I can't do anything about that. They should. People should have a web presence no matter what.

00:12:18
I don't really see them as competitors, but I definitely don't want to go and become a podcast host. So because of that, I'm just like, all right, I need to just be the best tool possible after the show is published into the feed. And so we build social media posting tools because not all the hosts do that, but we're not going to build show note creation tools because then that gets. Then it's, hey, we imported your episode. We made your show notes better.

00:12:39
Please copy and paste this back into Buzsprout. It doesn't make any sense for this. That's really driven the focus. That's helped a lot here. So from a product's feature standpoint, that's how I do it.

00:12:49
And it's super interesting because you're right that I think everyone knows that pretty much all the hosting platforms have a landing page tool as well. And so does it ever go through your mind to be like, I could lose if I don't start to diversify or grow outside of this, will I? As in you lose market share. I definitely could and have probably. And it's, some of it's self inflicted because I don't know if we've ever, you've been in a couple of conferences together.

00:13:16
I sometimes will give this talk about websites and in it I sort of lay out the spectrum of your website and it starts with your podcast host and it ends with WordPress or something like WordPress. Because I think that at a certain level, if your business is big enough, you might need something that's super customizable or has the 50 million plugins that WordPress has or whatever. I don't know. I think my opinion on that is somewhat changing as time goes on because of the feedback I'm getting from customers. But usually if someone says to me, I'm leaving pod page to move to WordPress, I celebrate it because I'm like, that means you must be doing really well because it's not cheap to have a real good site on WordPress and keep it maintained.

00:13:55
Because most people with that have hired a designer, have hired a developer, or like WordPress, being free is like a myth that most people figure out pretty early. Even if you can find a way to do it financially for free, it's such a time suck that it breaks all the time. And so for a younger podcaster or an indie podcaster, usually it's not really worth doing the WordPress thing for. A super new podcaster probably isn't even worth doing the podpage thing. I'm always like, if your podcast host's website allows you to point a domain to it, which is the critical piece, do use that for a while until you need something more, right?

00:14:25
Like you're not going to be able to customize as much. There's probably going to be very few if any options to connect with your audience, which I do believe is the main goal of the website. But if you only have $20 a month to spend on your podcast, you should probably pay for hosting. You shouldn't pay for pod page. And so I don't know.

00:14:40
So I do think that there's a chance, but I still think that there should be enough podcasters for this to be a nice little business. That's really been always my goal with, it's never been like, oh, this needs to be a billion dollar business. It's just not a reasonable expectation for a good little business. When I look at the active podcast account. And I look at my customer account, I'm like, there's plenty of room to grow, even if some people are moving back to the host or moving on to WordPress.

00:15:02
But again, I am not as aggressive as a marketer as I could be. But that's just I'm not very good at it. I'm really good at building stuff and serving customers. I'm not great at drip email campaigns and all the stuff that I'm horrible. Google ads.

00:15:16
The money that I waste on Google ads is ridiculous because I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm really better off at just like letting the customers love the product and tell each other about it. That's been the growth strategy for the most part. Oh, that's so, there's so much insight into that because I did want to go from, into everything that you said honestly around even knowing, because you might have a particular niche, like a particular avatar, let's call it that. It might be the podcasting niche, but even within that you've got a really good idea of where they are in their life cycle.

00:15:48
And so it's like, well, I'm really going to focus on this part of the lifecycle as well, which is super insightful. Okay, so there's that, and then there's also what you're saying around knowing what you're good at because this is still about focusing because I did want to then sort of touch a little bit on the marketing side of it and whether that's content marketing or otherwise around, and you started to touch on that as well. Like, I'm good at this or I'm not good at these things, so I stay away from that. So what have you tried, what have you discovered through that process of going, okay, this is the thing that I need to focus on because I just cannot. And how do you, again, stay disciplined around that?

00:16:27
Because again, I'm going to be honest, I'm like, even now, oh, I've got to be on YouTube even hearing like, yes, because I know that YouTube is the second large. Like, I know that you've just reminded me of that again. And I'm like, oh, man, I should be on YouTube. But it takes a little discipline. We're like, no, I don't have the bandwidth.

00:16:43
I don't have the will. I don't have all of those things. So what are the conversations you have in your mind around that, around the market, focusing on the marketing side of it? Like I said, I'm just not very good at it. I literally was thinking recently, I really like writing code and building things.

00:16:56
There's just something magical about taking, like, a small computer and writing some text on it and hitting save and then loading a website and it does some new thing that it didn't do before. This has just been my entire sort of adult life. It's like when we go on a vacation or something like that, and I was joking with a friend of mine who's very similar to me. We go on vacation and we take out our computer, and my parents or spouse or someone would be like, oh, sorry, you have to work or you're working. And I'm like, no, this is like, I get maybe a half day just to sort of hack away at something.

00:17:29
That's what I like doing, right? Some people like playing golf or some people like woodworking. This is my version of it's like the hobby. And so it's weird to connect because people are like, sway, what's your hobby? I'm like, oh, like building stuff.

00:17:39
What do you do for work? I build stuff. Well, then what's your hobby? Because that means your hobby is work. And I was like, or, no, does it mean my work is my hobby?

00:17:45
I'm really lucky to be able to just enjoy making things work feels like work. When I've got to sit down and come up with a marketing plan, I'm like, oh, God, this is not fun. So my issue still to this day is I just keep pushing that stuff off and I go, I'm like, let me build a new feature. Right now, I'm updating pod page to. You'll be able to rearrange your navigation bar, which is a stupid feature that we should have launched on day one, but we haven't.

00:18:14
But it's the number one feature request, and I finally figured out a way to do it that doesn't require me to rebuild everything. So I'm so excited to build it. Last week was supposed to be my marketing week, where I was going to do no, not touch code and instead audit some of my campaigns. And look at the dumbest thing that I do as a founder is I build new features, but I don't put them on our blog, on our marketing page. They're just in the dashboard and no one knows they exist.

00:18:37
I spend so much time building stuff and I don't tell anyone about them. And then competitors or something will launch the same feature and everyone's amazing. I'm like, oh, I did that six. I forgot to put on the marketing page. There's literally nowhere on the Internet that says that we do this.

00:18:49
So anyway, to get back to your question, what I'm trying to do is section off time and be like, okay, for an entire week I will do nothing but review our drip email campaign or our marketing campaigns. And like I said, I've been trying to do this for months and I keep pushing it back, but that's my aspirational goal is like, let me just focus because if I can focus on that for a week, I can make things better, but I'll never make things amazing, but I can make them better. And better is a lot of times good enough. I mean, when it comes to marketing, my experience has been with landing pages and stuff. I see a lot of landing pages.

00:19:19
They're gorgeous. Like they move as you scroll and it does make you feel like the company is serious, competent, well funded, all those good things. I've also seen one of my most successful friends has a company that does music distribution for an incredibly low price. And it's funny, like I said earlier, like small market music is pretty small market from a musician standpoint. But he managed to build a billion dollar company in a small market with a low willingness to pay and giving.

00:19:47
He basically sold everyone something for the rock bottom price. He's like a distributor, he's like the equivalent of Libson in the music space. But he did it in a way where everyone uses him, like everyone. And so that turned it into a big business. I was looking at his landing page the other day, it's like comically horrible, but it just says what he does, right?

00:20:05
It's a horrible, it's not good looking. And he and I talk about this a lot of all the wasted time and energy into making something seem flashy and beautiful when it just needs to work and it just needs to be clear what it does. Anyway, I'm rambling at this point, but I think that's always been the issue has been I get a little bit sometimes even today, enamored by, I'll go to a website and be like, that's really nice looking. Like I should redesign my website to look nicer. Oh, that tagline feels more aspirational.

00:20:30
I should do that. And then I do it. And this happened, actually, this literally happened within the last year since I saw you, probably. I think last time we saw each other was in Denver. So I think in Denver we sponsored and I had this big banner that said like podpage, the gold standard in podcast websites and something like that.

00:20:47
And I thought, I actually still like it as a banner at conference but then I was like, oh, this should be my tagline on my website. So I changed the tagline to that and I got all this feedback being like, what the hell does this thing do? And I was like, and it used to say, build a beautiful website. In five minutes, that tagline has been copied by some competitors. And so I was trying to differentiate, but then I realized it doesn't matter that the competitors copied it because people come to my website and they're like, what the hell's a gold standard?

00:21:08
And they don't know what that the hell that means. Am I a consulting company? And so I just switched it back to something more straightforward. And every time I try to more flashy with marketing stuff, I realize clear and straightforward tends to win. Even now, I'm still trying to figure that out.

00:21:22
So anyway, it's not a strength of. Mine, it's a never ending. I think it's an aspiration for all of us, to be honest. But that kind of leads into the whole conversation about leverage, because if we're going to focus on the things that we're good at and the things that we want to focus on, then it kind of means that we need other people. We need to be surround ourselves with other people that can do the other things that we don't want to.

00:21:44
Let's talk about that, because I know we had a really quick discussion even before we hit record about some ways that you're thinking about creating leverage. I know that you mentioned, look, the way that you think about it is you can't build a big team. So I'd love to know, do you have anyone in your team and how do you think about what it is that you need to next, quote unquote outsource or get off your plate? I'm not saying this is how you should break it down. Just quickly thinking about how I've done it, I guess I'd broken things down into marketing, customer support, and product engineering and design and that whole thing.

00:22:21
So I've always done all the product engineering, design, and then I always done the marketing, and I've always done the customer support. And still to this day, if you file a customer support ticket, there's a pretty good chance that I'm going to write you back because that helps inform what to build. And I've tried to outsource customer support 100% and have them keep like a feature request log. And there's something about reading, like a summary of feature requests that is totally different than reading hearing from the customer because the customer will tell you what, the problem they have is not the feature. And they'll come up with a feature that they think they will solve it.

00:22:54
But a lot of times if you're actually talking to the customer about the problem, it's liKe, oh, you don't want to be able to move your nav bar to the bottom or in the middle. You just want to be able to resort it because your problem is your main thing isn't the big button or something like that. I don't know. But what they might say is, I want to be able to move this thing here. And so I just can't imagine a time where I ever would not do customer support.

00:23:15
That said, it does take a lot of time, and so I hired someone a couple of years ago to help with customer support. There's a pitch of the job was there will be a flat fee or a flat salary, or it's not a salary, but a flat, like commission compensation. And the expectation is this will take about two to 3 hours a day. Once you're good, once you've learned all the stuff, maybe less. I actually think it's probably less than that on a lot of days, but it's not like work from ten to eleven or ten to noon.

00:23:40
It's like kind of check in once or maybe four or five times a day and do ten or 15 minutes of work. That was the framework. This is a part time thing. You probably can maintain a full time job as long as they're okay with maybe during lunch you're doing something else, right. And so that's how I've sort of been able to fit.

00:23:57
Help in is kind of like, hey, we actually don't need, customers are okay. It's great when you hit the help button and someone's there talking to you. That's a magical experience on anyone's site. But it's not really an expectation that most people actually, there are some people that feel like, oh, I'm spending $9 a month on this podcasting thing. Like, you should be there, and we should do hours of phone calls.

00:24:17
There's certainly customers that feel like their expectation is higher than it probably should be, just from a logical perspective on how much the thing costs versus paying a company thousands of dollars a month for an enterprise grade support. So most of the time that's been great. And there's a couple of people helping there. There was one person that was helping, like maybe once or twice a week they would jump in and Help, which is not a lot of time, but I'm like, I'll take that. It was great.

00:24:45
So that's on the support side. I feel like you can a lot of times, as long as you're willing to still be in there a little bit, because I really don't think you should delegate that 100%. I think it's good to get a lot of some people in because a lot of times the customer support is just, oh, great question. Here's the help article that we've written about it. And there are tools that are coming out that are more AI driven, that are more like, I think better than the old school, hey, how do I attach my custom domain and then it just feeds you an article that isn't really related?

00:25:10
I think the AI tools are going to help bring a level of automation to customer support that won't hurt the customer experience too much. We'll see. TBD. Okay, so that's support development. I just do everything and then there's some projects that I realize that are going to be too hard for me to figure out or too in the weeds.

00:25:27
And so I have some part time development help of people who have tons of other contracts. And so I just say, hey, in October, can we add Instagram as a place that people can auto post to? Right. Doesn't need to be this week, probably won't be till November because everyone's busy. But that's the next project and it gets done eventually and it's like something that would take me longer than it should.

00:25:48
I'd rather rebuild our templates. So that's how I've been managed to get without having to hire anyone full time. And so I've done that. And then on the marketing side, this is where I still feel like I trip over my feet every day, where I'm like, I've tried to hire people to run Google campaigns and Facebook campaigns and I've tried to hire people to what do we do? I guess it was more Facebook and I just have never felt satisfied with the outcomes of any of those.

00:26:13
And maybe it's because I don't really know what to expect. But again, there's not a lot of search volume when it comes to podcast websites and there's not a lot of money when it comes to paying for podcast websites. And when you look at how Google ads works or Facebook ads works, they're very expensive. And so you really have to make sure that it has to be fully optimized. Whereas, oh yeah, if I spend $150 on average getting a paying customer, I lose money for the most part.

00:26:38
And that's actually pretty, pretty good. A lot of the consultants that I hired were like, no, these are really good numbers. And I'm like, they're just not enough for the ticket price of the thing I sell. Where if I was Cloudflare and I was making $250 a month off people, it makes a lot more sense. And so I still haven't figured those platforms out.

00:26:54
And then content marketing, I do have someone who helps write on the pod page blog on a weekly basis, and that's an experiment. We actually don't know. Here's an example of stupid thing that I do. We're doing that, but we don't have a dashboard to tell. Are these blog posts driving clicks to the podpage website and then clicks, sorry, clicks to the podpage blog.

00:27:14
We have traffic numbers, but are they driving people to podpage? And are those people signing up and are then they paying? I should be like, well, here's how much we spend writing these articles every month. Do we make that much? But we're just now starting to develop some of those dashboards.

00:27:28
Content marketing is hard because it takes a long time for that to sort of pay off. But I don't have a plan. I'm not like, oh, six months ago we started that, and at the six month point we'll start measuring. And this is our expectation. We just do it.

00:27:38
So it's not an area that I'm particularly great at. If I could hire someone to come in and be like the marketing person and just help it help grow, I would love that. But I just have never found that person. I feel like the founder needs to be such a key part of it. And because I don't have a founding team, it's just me.

00:27:53
It's just me, right? If I had like two or three co founders, one person would be. Someone would be focused on that. Yeah, for sure. I'm in a little bit of a different position because obviously there's three co founders and we have very, very complementary skills, so none of us are technical, which is a crazy thing, but on the marketing side and stuff is probably more of our strength.

00:28:13
But we just went through something interesting, which is why I ask about leverage as well, because we probably. October 31. So a couple of weeks ago, we actually made the decision to cut pretty much almost all of our other team members full time. Sounds really ruthless, but it was a really, really hard decision. And there were things that were also out of our control.

00:28:35
That was like kind of making that decision, accelerating that decision, I should say. And honestly, since then, I've actually felt so much lighter and I've woken up with relief. And I know that it just means that between the three of us co founders, there's technically more on our plate, but it does actually force us to focus on what is it that's actually going to move the dial. And that's why I was really interested in having this conversation with you, because it's been on my mind definitely for the past few weeks to be like, we get told to build a team almost as quickly as possible, and that just might be my perception, but that's what I feel, as quickly as possible, because that's the marker of growth, right? If you want to grow, you've got to build a team, and I don't know if that's actually true.

00:29:27
So I'd really like to get your thoughts on that. Is that a myth? Is that truth? What's been your experience with that? I think that for the right business and for the right market, with the right funding, growing as fast as possible is probably a good goal.

00:29:43
And building a big team is a very good way to grow fast, because you have more bodies to do stuff right and you have more people to focus on things. And if my sort of environment was different and the venture cap, I had a bunch of venture capital sitting in the bank and I hired someone and paid them a good salary to focus 100% on getting more customers into podpage. I'm sure that we could be growing much faster now. We might not be profitable anymore if we were throwing a lot more money at people and ads and all those acquisition things. But if the goal was we need to make this business really big really quickly, that would definitely be a better way to do it than me literally dming people on Twitter after building them a website and being like, I built your website, would you even like to look at not.

00:30:31
It's not a very efficient way to do it. I just have never been. There's some people, I mean, having lived in Silicon Valley and known a lot of really amazing founders and people have sold companies for billions and all that, there are some people who are just wired to know how to scale up a business and know how to leverage themselves to get everyone else to do great work to achieve a certain scale to achieve. And if you're in the right macro environment where Google and all these companies are buying companies, there's all these other strategies I talk back on. We sold a company to Google.

00:30:59
It was mostly for the talent we had kept the team really lean, even though we had raised venture capital we could have hired three or four times the amount of people. And afterwards I look back and I go, oh. Because we ended up selling a company to Google mostly for the talent value of the talent. The fact that instead of making our funding last three years and trying to build something of value, if we would have literally just built an MVP with 15 people, as opposed to four people, we could have sold the company to Google potentially for five to six times as much, just because that's how certain deals are priced. Instead, we try to keep it lean.

00:31:33
And in the end of the day, I'm glad we didn't do that. But it is a little bit of an insurance. If you're really good at hiring and the thing doesn't work, being able to sell the business for the talent is a way to get your investors their money back, which I am a big believer in. I think if you raise money, you should optimize to get people their money back, even though it doesn't mean much to them. I wanted to pay investors back.

00:31:53
So anyway, all that said, I think that there's a reason to hire a bunch of people. But I think in many other cases, I think those are the outliers in a lot of ways. And for most individuals, it makes more sense to focus on trying to solve a problem. Until you have product market fit and you have customer momentum, and then you choose, is this a big enough, like, I think we have product market fit. I don't think it's necessarily a big enough problem to solve where I should hire a huge team, even though I have product market fit right now.

00:32:19
But if I was in a different business, maybe I would. I don't know. I think that there's a lot of people underestimate the immense mental strain it puts on a founder to manage even one employee. But having a whole team is a whole different thing. Your job suddenly goes from you started this business.

00:32:34
Most people I know, people who start businesses because they love hiring teams and mobilizing them, and that's what they're talented at and that's why they're great CEOs, but they're not really great product people. They only hire the product people. And that works sometimes. Usually not. But for me, I feel like most founders, they see a problem they want to solve, they're really good at solving it.

00:32:50
And once you spend a lot of time working on compensation plans and insurance reviews and all the things you have to do, when you have a bunch of people who might not be happy and keeping people happy and making sure things are fair and all the other things you have to. It's a massive mental strain. I think that's what most people, they're like. I'm excited to hire people, and then they hire people and like, wait, I didn't start a company to be a manager, but now I'm a manager. I'm not an entrepreneur anymore.

00:33:15
I'm a manager of people. So some people like it, some people don't. Yeah, I've definitely found that. Where I think why I feel so much relief is because going back to the focus thing, we were not focusing on what it is that we need. We were now focusing on all these other people and the things that they were doing to make sure that they were on top of the things that they were meant to be focusing on.

00:33:33
But that meant that our focus was completely split and just not manageable. So it's one of those things, I think, that you just need to go through as an entrepreneur and figure out yourself because we all have different styles as well. To your point, some people love doing that. We just realize we don't. Okay, what is the kind of business that we need to build?

00:33:53
Then? I think another angle that, and not everyone gives people equity, and this is very like Silicon Valley ish, but I think that there's also a mental strain in making sure. So there's all these different levels. There's, okay, this person's working for me. Are they happy?

00:34:07
Are we doing all the things we need to do to keep them happy and keep them motivated and all that? That's one huge thing. There's also what you just started alluding to, which is even the problem that I have even with contractors. So the contractor thing doesn't help this, but do they know what work they should be doing? Are they doing the work?

00:34:22
Is the work being successful? And so it ends up a lot of my time when I hire a contractor, there's a team right now that really wants to come on and help in a major way. And my feedback was, I don't have the time to tell you what to do because it's too much for me to have to write down all the reasons that we're doing this thing and all the ways that you don't know the product well enough that I have to do so much prep work. I'd rather just build it myself with no planning and just kind of mess around with it for a few weeks and then it will end up working versus spending a week specking it for you and then you'd spend eight weeks building it. So I think there's a lot of mental energy in just directing the work.

00:34:55
And then I think there's a third piece, which isn't always a requirement. But for another business I have, we built a really high revenue business that was growing very quickly, and it was last year's couple of years ago in the NFT space. And I could just sense that I didn't know how long this would last. Like podcasting, I believe will be around forever. But this one, I was like, we're at the right Place, right time.

00:35:15
I don't know if this is something that will be. Actually, I had a feeling like anything in crypto, it'll come and go. So I hired some people and I didn't give them any equity. And I remember there was this big sort of pushback when I would tell other people about this, and they were like, what do you mean you don't give your team equity? I was like, well, I pay them like a crazy amount because we're making a bunch of, like, I'm paying them based on the revenue we're making.

00:35:37
So they're making a really nice amount of cash. And I didn't hire a big team so I could just focus on a few roles and compensate really well. And I was like, but if I give them equity, that's me handing out lottery tickets. And my past experience as a founder when we did equity stuff is, I actually felt so guilty. I was like, oh, the equity isn't getting valuable enough.

00:35:55
This person left his job at Google to work for me and build this thing out. And I know how much Google stocks appreciating, and a lot of the reason you go to a startup is to get in the ground floor, get equity. And I was like, that weighed on me so much. And with my most recent experience, even when I hired full time employees, I was like, I don't want you any year to be worried about if the market goes away or whatever, worried about the equity not being worth it, Because I was like, I might never sell this Business. We didn't raise venture capital for it.

00:36:23
I was like, I might just shut it down one day. And I don't want at that point be like, oh, what do I owe you? I'd rather have just paid you really well. And not everyone does that. A lot of people give equity because it's Easy to compensate someone with low dollars and high equity.

00:36:36
But when you do that, I think that you end up getting yourself in this state of, oh, my God, I need to make sure that this company is worth it. For Dan, we need to sell the company for a lot of money because that's how he gets paid back for taking the salary hit. And personally, that really weighs on me. And so I just don't like being in that position. So I think those are the negatives for when you start hiring a team, and it could start with just one person.

00:37:01
It doesn't have to have a big team. It's like, as soon as you bring someone else on, it's like, oh, God, there's so much stuff that you need to think been. That's. I really wanted that. I moved to Silicon Valley and was like, I want to build a big team.

00:37:10
I want to build a billion dollar business. And then didn't. But when I started doing, like, a smaller business, I was like, oh, this is actually, there's a lot. Building the business part isn't nearly as fun as building the product. So I could just sort of like, for a while, I was like, oh, I'm broken because I'm not good at the building the business part.

00:37:27
And then I started realizing, like, oh, maybe it's an advantage for me. That's not important to me so I don't have to run in that race, and that's okay. Yes, I love that. What I love about talking to you about this is because it validates that there's actually no right or wrong answer. It's just finding what works for you in that particular moment and just going all in on doing that, I will.

00:37:53
Say you don't even have to go all in. So, like, I started Podpage 2019 pre COVID along some other projects. It did. Well, I need to go figure this out. My wife and I were talking about this.

00:38:05
It took a very long time for it to start making $1,000 a month. Like a very. Because I remember the day it made $1,000. I think we went to shake Shack to celebrate, but it just was a slow growth. Because podcasting is a slog.

00:38:21
This particular industry is uniquely hard to get the word out, in my opinion. I think James Cridlin, Pod News is the best news source for podcasting, or at least that I'm aware of. And he has, like, 25,000 subsCribers, or 30,000. And I had dinner with him a couple of weeks ago when we were in Denver, and I was like, how are you not at 500,000? There's so many podcasters, but there's just not, like, a canonical news place that everyone goes.

00:38:45
And so it's hard to get the word out about new stuff and so it just takes a little long time to grow. So you said go all in. The only reason I'm saying this is a few months after starting podpage, I got a job, I took a full time job, my wife was pregnant and I was like, I can't do this. I'm not going to raise money for it because of all the reasons I talked about before. I can work on this nights and weekends and it doesn't need to grow that fast.

00:39:09
And I did customer support before I started work. I did it on my lunch break and I did it after I got off and my wife helped. And then at night I would usually work a few hours at night to build stuff. And I did that for a year. I didn't need to go all in.

00:39:24
It wasn't the type of business that maybe if I wasn't doing that I could have grown faster. I don't know. But like you said, you do what works for you. And I found that I'm not missing a huge opportunity. I don't know, maybe I did.

00:39:34
But I'm like, this is the type of business that this could be a good business, but it's going to take a while and you can't force it. I guess I could have forced it by buying millions of dollars of Google Ads and being at every podcasting conference and showing up at every podcaster's door and handing them a flyer. But that's not this community. It's just like this community. It takes a while for, it's like tea.

00:39:52
It needs to steep for a while. There's nothing you can do. You can't shake the tea up and suddenly it's delicious. You just have to let it do its thing. I feel like that's how I've had to approach this business a little bit.

00:40:02
Yeah. But there's so much wisdom in just some things don't need to be forced. And I am all about, let me tell you about brute force. I am all about, we will push through this no matter what, and we will get through. But it's like, no, sometimes it doesn't have to be.

00:40:20
And actually, there's actually so much wisdom in that. Okay, so I know that we're running out of time. I do want you to tell people about podpage, about maybe what's coming up, what's something that's really exciting you. Why should people, maybe if they've tried it, come back, if they have never heard about it or tried it, why they should? I'd love for you to give us the new sexy tagline yeah.

00:40:42
Thing is, tagline is the same as that. It probably should have never touched the website in the first place. Like I said before, if you have a podcast and you have a feed, and you either have a website you're not happy with, or you don't have a website yet, you just come to Pod page, you put in your feed, or you type in the name of your podcast, and we pull it from Apple, and in literally 10 seconds, you will see about 13 or I think, 16 versions of the website and all the different templates, and it's got your content. We pull it all in. We'll pull in, obviously, your episodes from your feed, but we also go and we can pull in your videos from YouTube, we can pull in your reviews from Apple or Podchaser, and.

00:41:15
And then we make it really easy for you to build a pretty amazingly professional. At this point, that's all we have for today. My name is Deirdre Tshien, and this is the Grow My Podcast Show. And as always, stay awesome.