The Exchanges

Q private podcast for free because I'm obviously not going to charge my employees. It's really a communication mechanism versus if I were, let's say we started a private microconf podcast or startups, the rest of us started a, you know, a private podcast. We'd more likely charge for that. It would be premium content that we essentially would Probably charge a monthly subscription for. Is that, is that the idea?

A Yeah. And as it stands today in Kastos, you can integrate either via like a native integration with a tool like member space that we're directly integrated with. So you have member space that controls the membership kind of platform and the privileges and charges of everything of your membership site that then adds those people automatically to a private podcast that you host in Kastos or via Zapier, right? So then Zapier opens up to To kind of everything and everybody, all sorts of membership tools, all sorts of LMS and course platforms and everything. So where you can gate the access and the people there and make money and then kind of bolt on, we say, you know, cast us to, to expand the, the way you reach out to those folks in podcast format. Yep. And then kind of the next step for us logically is 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And as it stands today in Kastos, you can integrate”

Q Yeah, it's a fascinating competitive advantage, you know. I'm surprised that none of us thought about this sooner, and I'm including myself in there, and, and you, and Einar, and just anyone in the batch that we never thought about it enough to think about combining these. Why do you think that is?

A So like a little backstory, I guess, like, so the first version of our hosting platform was still under the Seriously Simple Podcasting brand. It was on the seriouslysimplepodcasting.com site and all this kind of stuff, and we went through a rebranding Exercise to become Castos. And part of that rebranding consideration was, why don't we just call it Podcast Motor? And for a lot of reasons, and I think this is one of the decisions we have to make now, is like, it gets difficult to discern between the editing service and the hosting platform if they're all under the same roof. And so, you know, we're going to move forward with this integration to kind of bring the two companies together, but they might still have separate websites and they might just be like an integration partner that, you know, ultimately all the money still goes into the same bank account and all that kind of stuff. But that's the reason we didn't put the, the hosting platform under the podcast motor.com brand before, because we had some concerns about what do people who know podcast motor as an editing service come in and see this hosting stuff? Like, what are they going to think? So I had definitely, uh, Thought about combining the brands before and then made a decision to, to treat them as separate entities as one because of like branding and messaging and things like that. The other is, you know, what is …

AI assessment note: “That's the reason we didn't put the, the hosting platform under the podcast motor.com brand”

Q you guys, I believe this I've lost count, but this is either fifth week or it might be the sixth week. I genuinely don't know of, of quarantining. I'm curious. Craig, how are you like mentally in terms of, um, being able to focus on work? You know, similar. I guess this relates to the question I asked earlier, but I asked it more about your team and the company.

A Yes. Similarly at the, the first surely week or two, I was, yeah, just sad. And, you know, I, I've heard it being compared to like mourning, you know, losing a loved one that you're just sad and then you're angry and then you accept it and learn kind of how to live with things. And yeah, I mean, at this point I'm good on a, on a kind of spiritual level. I'm productive at work. I feel really happy and blessed that, that my family is, Is happy and healthy. And I mean, it really is business as usual. For me, I'm actually working more now than I normally would because there's nothing else to do. So I'm, I'm working 25% more than I normally do. And that's, I, I feel really happy about that because, yeah, I do have a, you know, responsibility to, to our team and to our customers, and, and I'm glad that we're able to continue serving them.

AI assessment note: “at this point I'm good on a, on a kind of spiritual level. I'm productive”

Q a staggering accomplishment. And I think I do want to talk to you a little bit later on in the show about how, how you possibly got a hundred YouTube videos done in that amount of time. But realistically, high level. You start this hundred days of AI. What did you learn that you were super surprised, super surprised that you learned in that hundred days? Any high level stuff?

A Yeah, yeah, I guess just for, for kind of context, on my podcast, uh, which has been on break, I think fairly so, because I've been publishing YouTube videos for, for three months straight, I had Brendan Hufford on. You probably know of Brendan, he does growth sprints. Um, super interesting guy. He was telling me on our podcast interview, he kind of came on the scene, as he said, because he did a hundred days of SEO. And this is about a 120 days ago. I was like, that is a freaking great idea. I was going to do sales at first. I was like, I'm going to do a hundred days of sales because I have a sales background. I was like, you know what? AI is the, you know, topic du jour. I should do this. And so I did, and it was super freaking hard. Uh, we can talk about like the production and the process and all that kind of stuff. But what I learned at a high level is it's incredible and not there all at the same time. And, and what I mean by that is it, it's all the stuff you see on, on, on Twitter, right? It's the, Oh, I automated my entire life with AI and this NNN workflow with like, 87 nodes and all this kind of stuff. 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 to every…

AI assessment note: “what I learned at a high level is it's incredible and not there all”

Q size, but, you know, let's say it's certainly not, probably not 10 people at two and a half million. So let's say it's some, you know, 15 to 30, your culture, you can lose your culture, right? You can lose the threat on it. And I know you've done a lot of thought, you've given a lot of thought to this, so I want to hear from you on it.

A Yeah, I think, I think this is probably still that scrappy startup culture kind of phase. I think two and a half million, that's nothing to sneeze at, right? Yeah, you know, 12, 15 people, probably, if you're, you know, profitable and bootstrapped, like, you still need to kind of own your, your small business roots, I think. The bigger culture and the growing team, things like culture become more important as you're scaling and hiring more, because every time you hire, For me, at least, it's a chance for culture to get kind of eroded a little bit, right? You have this one hire that's two degrees kind of one way or the other, and it changes your culture if you're not really intentional about, about keeping it. You know, culture, I'm gonna mess up the quote, but like culture is the personification of your values, right? It's like what you do every day versus kind of what you say you do as a company. I don't know Amar, I know of Amar from Twitter, and I know that you're kind of walking the walk, and that's really what Culture is. You show up every day, shipping stuff, providing value to customers, and knowing that everyone else in your, in your company is doing the same thing. I don't think it needs to be any more complicated than that, and probably anything but that is like this premature optimization to say like, hey, we're going to get big air quotes.

AI assessment note: “every time you hire... it's a chance for culture to get kind of eroded”