Craig Hewitt
Founder and CEO, Castos. On 2 shows, 9 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivehostoperator@thecraighewitt ↗LinkedIn ↗craighewitt.com ↗
Craig Hewitt is the founder and CEO of Castos, a podcast hosting and analytics platform that grew out of his earlier podcast editing business, PodcastMotor. He also hosts the Rogue Startups podcast, mentors startups through TinySeed, and documents business automation and AI adoption via his 100 Days of AI series.
2shows
9appearances
54statements
5resolved
3supported
0contradicted
60%fully supported
40said about them ↓ Everything Craig Hewitt said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hewitt: AI workflows only work 80% of the time and require humans
“Yep, like that a hundred percent exists and I built that and it works about 80% of the time. And so it's that 20% that is still, you know, the human in the loop or the human augmented or amplified experience with AI. That's where we are today. And that applies…”
Hewitt: Claude Code is the best AI tool for coding
“So I think probably the easiest one is like for code, Claude code is, is the answer.”
Hewitt dismisses ChatGPT for business tasks as merely a consumer product
“I don't care for ChatGPT for almost everything, because it's a consumer product.”
Hewitt names Manus as his single best AI tool choice
“Probably the tool, if I just had, like, Craig, you get to use one tool it would be Manus”
DocsBot cut the support burden in half for Castos's 4,000 customers
“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.”
Hewitt: Founders should make $100 per month the minimum SaaS price
“Selling a 20 dollar a month thing is super hard. It's a hundred bucks a month. Absolute entry point for anything that I do these days. And I think for most people, like, if you can't come up with an idea to sell a hundred dollar a month thing, I would probably…”
Hewitt: AI wrappers are short-term flips, not two-year businesses
“I see these wrappers as like a quick hit. Like if you want to go make a hundred grand, that's about the easiest way I can imagine is you go wrap Claude and you do a thing and you go make it big and you sell it on Acquire.com at 15 grand a month, you know, doub…”
Hewitt: Paid Mentorship Is Far More Valuable Than Peer Mastermind Groups
“Paying someone who has actually done the thing is way more valuable than pretty much any other peer group. Because that is then the answer, and you have a relatively high confidence that that's right.”
Hewitt: Startups Must Avoid Brand Marketing Until Reaching Millions in Revenue
“If you're at a few million, maybe you can allocate 20% of your marketing budget to brand marketing, but until then, like you gotta be like hand to hand.”
Hewitt: Podcast advertising is a 'garbage' monetization model for many creators
“To date, the only kind of native podcast-only way to do that has been ads, and it's just a garbage, like, monetization method for a lot of people is having, you know, Audible or mattresses.com or whatever as a person that's sponsoring your show, and so, like, …”
Hewitt: Not requiring upfront credit cards matches podcaster behavior better
“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.”
Hewitt: Done-for-You Services Provide Step-Function Value Compared to Software
“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…”
Hewitt: A $20M exit provides life freedom that $500k cash flow cannot
“I think that, you know, if you look at really kind of changing your life and putting you on a different trajectory, you know, selling a business for twenty million and taking home, you know, whatever, 10 changes your life versus a business that, that cash flow…”
Hewitt: Companies forced remote during COVID will not fully return to offices
“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…”
Hewitt: COVID-19 economic recovery could take months, not years like 2008
“That external event will go away and things will come back much more quickly, I think. Out of this, then they did the financial crisis, you know, that was years and this could be months, you know, sometime around the end of the year, maybe.”
Podcast Hosting Storage-Based Pricing Is Broken
“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.”
Hewitt: Castos cannot reach $20M solely from podcast hosting
“Castos by itself as a podcast hosting platform can't. It's not a twenty million dollar company, I don't think.”
Craig Hewitt: YouTube Retention Algorithms Force Creators to Sacrifice Instructional Depth
“And I think that the nature of a larger piece of content where you can really take the time and you don't have to worry about drop-off rates or click-through rates or things like that, like you do in a YouTube video, offers the opportunity to go in-depth so mu…”
Hewitt: Castos Grows Faster with 1-on-1 Sales Than with 15-Person Brand Strategy
“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.”
Hewitt: Monetization tools shift podcast hosting from an expense to an asset
“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…”
Hewitt: Private podcasting could evolve into multi-contributor community feeds
“I do think there very well could be a day where it is more like a community where everyone can contribute podcast content to the feed or whatever you use. And then it goes out to everybody.”
Hewitt: Castos spent $20K outsourcing React Native app over retraining PHP developers
“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.”
Hewitt: Raising $5M earlier could have made Castos the standout leader
“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.”
The other half of the tape: Craig Hewitt's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 37 times in 25 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 33Zach Moreno 2Ruben Gamez 1Braden Dennis 1
Statements about Craig Hewitt, by other people (3)
Walling reveals Castos generates low seven figures in annual recurring revenue
“And you were season one of Tiny Seed Tales, and you're now doing low seven figures of ARR.”
Rob Walling: Craig Hewitt bought Seriously Simple Podcasting for under $10k
“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.”
Walling: Castos doubled team and tripled revenue without extra funding
“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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 37
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2024 12 mentions in 10 episodes 1 per episode
- Episode 724 | Managing Managers, Breaking Through Plateaus, Thoug...
- Episode 736 | Founder Regrets, DIY vs. Hiring, Defining your ICP,...
- Episode 718 | When to Give Up, Open Source Competition, Painful F...
- Episode 716 | Positioning Against Incumbents, Changing Your H1, H...
- Episode 711 | Finding Early Customers, Horizontal vs. Vertical, P...
- Episode 708 | Outsourcing Marketing, Competitive Markets, and Mor...
- Episode 705 | From Bootstrapped to Mostly Bootstrapped
- Episode 704 | Landing Pages, Buying a SaaS, the Right Tech Stack,...
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Episode 541 | Rob Solo
- Episode 542 | 10x in Two Years, Past $3M ARR with SquadCast
- Episode 558 | Thinking Through Funding as a Bootstrapper
- Episode 552 | Google Audits, Partnerships, and Freemium with Mike Taber
- Episode 538 | When to Sunset a Product, Enterprise Security Assessments, Lifetime Deals,
- Episode 536 | A Few Things I Learned in 2020 (A Rob Solo Adventure)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Episode 523 | Breaking Through Plateaus, Entrepreneurship for Kids, Common Bootstrapper
- TinySeed Tales Season 2 | Episode 1: Introducing Gather
- Episode 521 | A Roundtable Discussion about a Potential Recession, Working from Home,
- Episode 516 | When to Re-write Your SaaS Codebase
- Episode 489 | 15 Years to a SaaS Exit (Plus Why Forecasting is Crucial)
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Craig's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Castos | 7 | 36 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Castos | 2 | 18 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |