Castos

“And you were season one of Tiny Seed Tales, and you're now doing low seven figures of ARR.”

“It's cut our customer support burden in half at Castos, and we have 4000 customers, so that's like a lot of customers. Every day it diverts handfuls of conversations from our support team.”

“Castos by itself as a podcast hosting platform can't. It's not a twenty million dollar company, I don't think.”

“We thought, hey, we'll do a bunch of brand marketing, and it'll really result in a lot, and it didn't, and now we're much more one-to-one, and we're growing faster than we were when we were a team of 15.”

“Like raising money is in itself is not a milestone. It's a tool like that. I love the Craig from Castos. It's a tool to live in the future. Like that's exactly like, I don't think I've heard of a better saying on what funding is because in itself, It's not a m…”

“Someone approached him. They said, I have a WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. I will sell it to you for almost nothing. And I think he's been public about that purchase price. I will just say it's less than 10,000 dollars.”

“Doing all of that natively within the platform allow our customers to charge directly for content right in our application, and so that's something that we're actively working on now.”

“And it allows us to kind of shift where we stand with our customers from being, you know, we say a liability, right on their kind of Mental balance sheet to an asset, right? If we are allowing our customers to make money every month, they're very happy to stay…”

“We made a very conscious decision in the first iteration of this that It will be streaming only. There will be no file downloaded to the phone, so it can never be taken with an employee afterwards. There is no visibility to the RSS feed at all, so they can't c…”

“In hindsight, the thing we did right is we didn't try to peel off one of our developers that is a PHP developer to go learn React Native is we just said, hey, let's go spend the 20 grand that this will cost and hire the specialists.”

“What if we'd raised like five million dollars three years ago and built this? We could be the standout leader in this space, and we didn't, and we're not, like, I think we're at the very kind of edge of this with what we're doing.”

“We've been driving hard new feature creation for a long time, and we kind of said, hey, we need to, like, Not take a step back, but like focus some of our efforts on really perfecting certain aspects of the product. And that's all that's really changed. And so…”

“One is the, from a metrics perspective, the thing that has improved is churn. We've always had very good churn, but we're having kind of close to zero percent churn in the last two months, which is makes growth really easy. Because we're having customers upgra…”

“For about the last six months, we've gone in this practice of having one of our developers beyond what we call support rotation each week. And so that developer is the only contact that our support team can have when they need to escalate a ticket. And so that…”

“You couldn't look at the pandemic happening and everyone sheltering, starting to shelter in place, and then suddenly build and launch Zoom, or build and launch Tuple, build and launch Squadcast, or Castos. You had to be in the game doing something. In order to…”

“Before season one of Tiny Seed Tales, before we, as we started recording it, you were at four full-time employees, now you're at eight, and you tripled in revenue. You were already into five figures of monthly revenue when the season started, and then over the…”

“And even more than, like, I think the other path there could be, let's hire a content marketer just to write. Let's hire an agency to run Facebook ads. Let's hire a copywriter to this landing page, but I'll be the glue to hold it all together or the person to …”

“So there are task based people, project based people and owners. I originally was saying founders, but I think it's more of the, really, I should say it as task mindset, project mindset, owner mindset. And I think that fits of like who can really own this whol…”

“So we hired a full stack developer recently and Jonathan, our lead developer was the final say in who we hire basically. And we're hiring a support person now and Matt on our team is going to be the final say in who we hire there as like that last interview.”

“And I think from a compatibility with, like, the user behavior perspective, not asking for credit card up front is definitely the way to go.”

“I think most of it came down to engineering resources. I hate to say it is that if it was just a flip of a switch in Stripe or something, I probably would have tried it, but it would have required a bit of work on the back end to get that implemented.”

“The metric around Castos that has been the worst, that, that's kind of tough to affect is, like, our average revenue per user. We're just not a hundred dollar a month kind of app. And I don't know that we would ever be for the majority of our customers.”

“And I think the value in a software tool is incremental. You know, we were talking in a previous episode about like incremental steps versus like big major steps that would, you know, double or triple the size of the business. You know, building software to he…”

“I mean, we have mental health professionals having private podcasts for each of their patients. We have Fortune 100 companies that we're working with having internal private podcasts for their sales team or for their HR groups.”

“We're a podcast hosting and analytics provider that also has a built-in production service. So for shows like this, for folks who want to kind of host their podcast distributed to places like, you know, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that's what we do, provide an…”

“Like 70, 30... 70 SAS.”

“Most, most folks are on the beginner plan because a lot of folks, you know, podcast is for a lot of people is not a revenue generating thing. So they have a hard time paying too much for it.”

“You know, there's just a ton of kind of velocity in the podcasting space these days, and so we expect something to happen with our business in the next Five years, say.”

“We're right at 2000 customers.”

“So we're seven full time people. And with the services arm, we have some contractors that do, you know, audio editing, writing. We have some folks on the marketing team that help on a contract basis.”

“Yeah, and so with the services, we're right at 60,000 a month.”

“A 120. Yeah. I mean, you know, they had kind of their standard deal. I'm sure I and I talked about that when he was on it and we didn't have kind of too many questions there and, you know, we signed up there and they took a percentage of equity in return for t…”

“Yeah. I mean, our monthly churn is like two and a half percent.”

“I mean almost all, we don't do any paid acquisition hardly at this point. So all of ours is, is organic, you know, content and SEO. So I don't have a number, but it's very low.”

“There are companies that wanted to rip the bandaid off, but were scared to, and now they had to, they won't want to go back because their employees love working from home and doing podcasts instead of in-person meetings and things like that. So I think that so…”

“No, I didn't apply. So, right, I, my salary does not qualify, and the other two U.S.-based folks that we have are 10 99, so they don't qualify either.”

“So the plugin had about 15,000 active installs in WordPress at the time.”

“We have just under a thousand paying customers now.”

“And for us, you know, it's kind of a funny business because the storage, you know, doesn't really cost anything. It's the bandwidth for us to send files out. So I think the pricing just in the industry is broken or a little funny.”

“We're four people. All contractors and, you know, getting up to full time. So that includes myself. Two developers, a support rep and myself.”

“Podcast Motor, does you know, podcast editing and production services for podcasters, and it's still bigger than Castos, but Castos is kind of where I focus most all my time now.”

“No, but I think if you're a betting man, betting person, you would say Google will start indexing audio very soon, and that's what we think. So the SEO impact of podcasting will get massive, you know, for folks that have hundreds of shows.”

“We're kind of a B to prosumer B to B to C kind of model and our SAS is below six percent on a monthly basis.”