Speaker 0 00:00:00 Okay,
Speaker 1 00:00:04 Welcome back to the audience podcast today. We're excited to announce that Castile's has acquired another podcast. Hosting company and podcast hosting company is podiums. You can find <inaudible> at podium.co pod on the heels of our last acquisition, which was the three clips podcast. Greg joins us again today to talk about how the whole deal went down, what podium customers should expect and what special surprises Castiels customers should expect. And I'll tell you, I'm really excited about it. Don't forget to follow the audience podcast at casto.com/audience. Leave us a review wherever you like to leave reviews, Apple, or even pod chaser. If you have a moment, okay, let's dive into today's episode with Craig Craig. You're back already. It's been not even a month
Speaker 2 00:00:49 A month. Uh, it's dangerously too frequent. I know, but it's good to talk, Matt. Thank you for having me on the podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:55 Julie, you show up when there's massive industry news, or you bought something here at Castillo's. That's what we're here. You know, last time, April 29th, we chatted about three clips, podcasts getting acquired. Of course, here at cast dos and three clips joining the family. Now we're here to talk about another podcast hosting company, joining the Castillo's family. Potent, welcome to all of the potent podcasters creators that are out there, who are now tuning into audience podcast. For the first time, we are fresh off of a call with podium customers. So they were asking all the tough questions what's going to happen to our podcast files. What's going to happen to our podcast websites. What's the future of cast those hold for us as podium podcasters, where do you want to start? Do you want to start at what this transition means for podcasts, creators at podium and what they'll see and not see now that we make this transition?
Speaker 2 00:01:52 I, I hope that a lot of podium podcasters are listening and that we can share our thoughts and kind of playing with them here. We just did that in the town hall that, that we just got off of mat. And that was really great to be able to talk real time with folks, but, but hope that this serves as a bit of an async asynchronous way for us to share a bit about how this all came about, what folks can expect and, and how the transition to publishing your podcast at Castillo's will go. And I think the, the short answer for, for podium customers is nothing will change about your podcast today or tomorrow or next week, even about a month from now. So about the middle of June, we will have migrated all of the content over and, and have it ready to where you can publish your podcast on Castro's.
Speaker 2 00:02:34 And it's taking that long because we are very much taking a kind of measure twice, cut once approach to this, because we know this is a large amount of data. This is really sensitive. This is people's podcasts that they rightfully are, are very concerned about keeping just as they are. And, and we're very concerned about that too. And so our engineering team is doing a bunch of work in the background, moving zeros and ones around to, to get data into our system the right way, the right time in the right format, the first time. So that podium customers can just show up one day and start publishing their podcasts. And Castro's, it's completely transparent to subscribers and podcasting platforms like Apple and Spotify, and they don't have to worry about anything other than, Hey, instead of logging in at podium, eat logging at cast us and publish your podcast there.
Speaker 2 00:03:21 So, I mean, I think that the message I would have, and a lot of the questions we had in the town hall were, Hey, what's going to go on with my podcasts over here on Castillo's. What, what are you guys going to do? What do I have to do? Are all of my files going to be lost? Are you going to read and code them in some crazy cheap format? That's going to sound like garbage. And the answer is you don't need to do anything. We're going to take care of everything on our end. That's, that's our responsibility as the new home for your podcast. Everything about your show remains exactly the same. That's the promise that, that we're living up to as the new kind of home for, for your podcast. And honestly, we're super excited about it. I think everywhere from Matt to, to Kim, who's our customer experience manager to Alec who leads it, whatever our development team are excited about the opportunity to serve a big new group of, of podcasters, who, who frankly have been publishing their, their show on a really great platform. The podium is you talk to folks that are potent customers and they love it and they love Mark. And frankly, we have big shoes to fill. And I'm excited about that challenge and about showing the potent customers what cast is all about. So yeah, I think it's, it's, it's the right good kind of challenge for, for us as a company.
Speaker 1 00:04:29 And I look where it's from podium versus Casto Casos and I think you mentioned this on the, on the call, we're just a few years ahead with air quotes. We're just a few years ahead of where podium is. As, as a business, we have, of course, more folks that work here at Casos. We have, I guess I'll say a little bit more of a mature platform, more feature sets. We, we have engineers who are dedicated to this stuff all day long or things like this migration, things like building out private, podcasting analytics, all this stuff. We're not too far off from where podium could have been in a couple of years. So it's great to sort of get folks involved or move it over now in this, at this time
Speaker 2 00:05:08 And frame, the fear of a lot of people is, Oh, potent, this, this really great platform that I love. And I knew the founder and could email them any time is being consumed by company X. That's just going to garbage everything and make a mess of my podcast. And I feel very confident saying, that's not us as a company. That's not me. That's not you. And that's just not, that's not what we do. So I feel really comfortable and proud to say that, yeah, we, we are for indie podcasters. We are for creators creators. The term that we use both internally and talking like on this podcast is that's what we do when we're 12 people that wake up every day in support creators and not big company X or mega conglomerate, Y and as long as I'm here, I think that's what we'll continue doing, just because it's fun. And there's no point in doing any of this, if it's not. So that's the one thing I would kind of reiterate. And that's for everybody, not just putting in customers, but for our customers or people in the industry that aren't podcasting yet or hosting somewhere else's and that's who we are. And that's who we're going to be serving for a long time.
Speaker 1 00:06:10 That's the thing we hang our hat on, right? A lot of people say, what's the, why should I move to castles? Well, I could read off a whole bunch of features featureless for you. You can talk about private pilot. We talked about WordPress integration. We talk about that stuff, but we are creators first. We're not that mega company. And we just hope that while that not might, that might not be attractive to everyone. I mean, maybe people are looking for a shiny bell and whistle and all of these other things. We're a small company. We feel like we're punching up above our weight class. And we have something to prove in the podcasting space and we really want to preserve, or at least part of my ideals are like, we really want to preserve that genuine podcaster. Who's creating a podcast for the love of it, or they're informing, they're educating, they're using it as brand awareness. And it's not just, I don't know, Warner brothers studio creating like a Marvel podcast, like millions and millions of dollars to throw at it. Uh, we're we're trying to do it for, for the, the large audience of podcasters. And we hope that that resonates with, uh, the newcomers coming over from, from podium, part of the announcement. What do you think podium users are gonna enjoy most switching over to cast us? Like what, what thing do we have, do you think, ah, I can't wait for them to enjoy this.
Speaker 2 00:07:31 That's a big list, but, but, and this is in no particular order other than it's kind of my top five things that pop into my head. When you asked that question, I think there will be a lot of people that have WordPress websites that will start using serious assemble podcasting. And that migration is literally a click of a button. So that's awesome. And I'm excited for them to experience that. I think private podcasting is an obvious one that a podium hadn't gotten explored the private podcasting space and it's somewhere that we're investing heavily. And so the tool set we have now, the tool set will have even a couple of weeks is going to change a lot. And a couple weeks after that is going to change even more. I'm really excited about that in general and, and stoked to be able to share that with, with everybody there, multiple podcasts support is something that I think that just from a pricing perspective, we kind of bake in and say, Hey, an accounts can have as many podcasts you want.
Speaker 2 00:08:18 We have some accounts with 20 podcasts. And I mean, that, that kind of goes back to, we just want people to podcast as much as they can, and you'll never be charged extra too, to have an extra podcast here. Those are the things that, that come to mind right off the bat. I'll tell you, Matt, I just got this email before we hopped on the call here. One of the things that, that, that folks at podium had the access to that Castillo's customers will have an access to now, as a result of this is the ability to publish their podcast from D script directly to their platform. So potent had this integration and I'll, I'll speak, I'll speak a little ahead of this being available, but, but it's coming very quickly as that you'll be able to upload your raw content de script, edit it down and push publish. And that will get pushed out from de script into Casos here in the next month. That's the kind of thing that an acquisition like this excites me. It's not just, Hey, consolidation in industry are customers moving from one place to another, but doors opening that might not have been open to, to our whole platform before we have more ability to, I'm gonna say, throw that weight around, but influence other things in the market to where we're just able to offer more things to customers
Speaker 1 00:09:30 Was I was going to be one of my next questions is what is, what does the cast dos customer podcast or get out of this whole deal? And the script, I'll tell you the script right on top of my list. Cause I use it to edit all of my podcasts and I can't wait to get that feature set right in, in the script to be able to publish my episode there. So if anyone's listening to this, say, I know Craig said, it's going to be in the future. Well, you have a cheerleader right here sitting in this seat. Who's going to be making sure that we get that feature.
Speaker 2 00:09:56 And Matt does not. Let me forget things like this. So it's not just going to fall by the wayside.
Speaker 1 00:10:01 He said, I was getting the script for Christmas and then I am not going to let him forget it. When we were on that, the town hall call, it made me realize, as you were just mentioning, like we're, we're getting bigger, we have more influence. We can do things now. Sort of really put our stamp on the podcasting industry. We have a lot of resources here. One of the customers asked, what, what do you do to help us as podcasters to get our name out there? And as much as I'm in this all day, creating podcasts, creating YouTube videos and other content, there's just a ton of stuff that we have that we do. It was a moment of, okay, I'm proud of this, but also one of my tasks, one of my jobs is I gotta to do a better job of getting the stuff out there.
Speaker 1 00:10:43 And it made me realize doing the community stuff for a while. Now we have the podcast hackers group on Facebook, and I mentioned all of these things to this customer, including YouTube, including the Academy. I was like, we have an amazing blog. That's produced every single week as well with the email newsletter that goes out, we have a ton of, of resources and having these new customers come in again and now we get more eyeballs on it. Yes, but we get more influence too. We can get some feedback from the podium users say, you know what? We need this course in the Academy or wouldn't it be great if you covered this with the audience podcast? And most certainly I can tell you almost certain Craig, and those of you who listened to the creator spotlight episodes that go out, we have so many podcasters now coming into, into Casos and from podium and future customers, the creator series could be a series onto its onto its own because we have that many podcasters who want to get the word out about their podcast. And, and that's going to be something special. I think for the next six months for the rest of the year of seeing how, how we build that out, sort of betting on ourselves on that one. I'm kind of interested to see what we can do with that. Now that we're a little bit bigger with the footprint of podcasters that we have
Speaker 2 00:12:03 That kind of informs another new development coming from our end is we'll have someone else joining the team here on Monday a week. Well, a little less than a week from now who will, will be helping us with, with kind of marketing and content creation. They are a podcaster and they may just get the opportunity to lead the creator spotlight series and turn it into a weekly show show of its own. I think one of the, one of the two things is podcasters are looking for new and interesting and genuine ways to promote their shows. And this is a fantastic way to do it is, is for the company where they partner to, to publish their podcasts, to, to bring them on and to learn about their podcast and help them promote it. That's really great, but also it's a super educational resource, especially for new podcasters to say, Hey, how can I learn?
Speaker 2 00:12:52 Not from Craig and Matt, who frankly have been doing this for six or seven years, but whatever, bring on like new people and talk about, Hey, what you just launched your show a month ago? Tell us about like the hard things, because I don't remember launching my first show and, and it's all changed, right? And so that's what I'm really excited about with the creator spotlight series is like one, a person will, will kind of own that. And that'll be their main responsibility from our team to we'll be doing it a lot more often. It'll probably be its own show. And three we'll be getting on super experienced podcasters. There was someone on our town hall call just now with 500 episodes, love to get them on love, to also get on someone who just launched this week and say, okay, those scars are fresh. Let's talk about that, your experience there and what you learned so that we can pass that on to other folks.
Speaker 1 00:13:35 Previous episode that came out on the audience podcast, it was a creator series with Tim McKenna and one of the biggest challenges, you know, he shared, he wasn't doing, he's been doing it now for a couple of years. So since the sort of the end of 2019 and his thing was, he thought he was going to start his podcasts with a couple of co-hosts. So some friends of his talking about like design and business and all of this fun stuff. And he quickly realized that he was the only one in the room that who really wanted a podcast than these other guys that he was reaching out to. They were kind of like, Hey, podcasting is cool. We don't want to do it. We don't want to be the ones like behind the microphone. So he had a little bit of an up Hill battle in the beginning.
Speaker 1 00:14:11 So it's those lessons that like, maybe you have forgotten or I have forgotten. And just everyone has just a unique issue, uh, with getting their podcasts going, funnily enough, it's never about the podcast equipment. Like everyone thinks about, it's never like everyone agonizes over the selecting of the microphone and doing all this stuff, but it's literally never that it's something else in the story arc in the premise of a show or maybe the logistics of it where you think you're going to have a co-host or a couple of co-hosts or guests in this stuff sort of falls through. And that's the biggest challenge, especially in the room
Speaker 2 00:14:47 Talking about the customers that are, that are coming over from podium and, and you, you alluded to like, why did we do this? And really, that's why as I've known Mark from podium for a few years now, and we've kind of stayed in touch just as folks in the industry. And he came to us and said like, Hey, I just, I'm ready to move on to go do something different. Like this is, this is not what really excites me anymore. This is not, you know what I want to make my life's work. And, and it is for me. Right. And it is for you. And I hope it is for everybody on our team. I think it is. And, and I'm, I'm most excited about this, that we were able to take, what is a fantastic platform and the customers there and give them a really great place to base their show now.
Speaker 2 00:15:30 And that's why we did it is I didn't want any of those folks to be kind of left out in the cold or, or to be somewhere where their show wouldn't be really taken care of, because I know that up until now, Mark has done a fantastic job of, of building a great platform and taking care of those people. And him directly has been engaged in a lot of those customers. And I am really proud that that, like we are a team and a platform and a company that can take that body of work that, that Mark created and those customers, and bring them over with a lot of confidence that they're going to be happy podcasting here. And, and the new home for their show is going to be somewhere that, that they really dig. I think that was like the thing I was most excited and proud of with this whole thing.
Speaker 1 00:16:13 One of the benefits aside from the features is, is not that Mark didn't have good support before, but now we are just expanding of that support, right? To the technical support, the onboarding support, the migration support, the education support here by a Casto. So it should be a win-win all around from customers who are coming over with, like you said, 500 plus episodes or five episodes. Everyone should be in good hands, or at least we hope so. And that's, that's what we're here for. And that's why we show up every single day. You were very proud of that map as you should be Craig, the map of us all around the world. So it's great. It's awesome stuff. It is.
Speaker 2 00:16:49 It is. And I mean, just from a kind of founder perspective, it is more and more, the thing I'm most excited about is, is we get people like you and people like Kim and people like Alec and people like Francois on our team in here, who one just do a lot better job at the thing that they do right then, then I could. But also because now we have 12 people who all kick ass at their thing and that's really, really cool to see is, okay, we have this big engine behind what we're doing now. And we can, we can do a lot of good work for, for our customers and the industry and the resource we put out. And the, the events that we help with and things like that as kind of esoteric, as it sounds like the good we can do for, for the world, if not just the podcasting world is like one of the real values of, of a company and a company getting bigger to where we can just do more, a lot more good stuff for everybody.
Speaker 1 00:17:41 So the time that you might be listening to this, if this is the first time you've, or you've heard of Castro's, if you haven't seen any of the emails going out or any of the notices on the blogs or websites, send us an email.
[email protected], go to castles.com to help explore the platform. If you have any questions for us, shoot a message over to our support team, check out our YouTube channel, check out again, both announcement posts we will have available in the show notes of this episode. Feel free to send us any questions you have. If you're a newcomer from podium, go to academy.castles.com, dive into all the educational material and resources we have there. That's the audience podcast for today. Greg, I'll see you in a couple of weeks, right? When you, when you, when you get something else, I mean, I think we're, I think we're done for now, but yeah, hopefully, hopefully back on in a couple of weeks with some exciting product updates that we can share with everyone. Awesome. Awesome stuff, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode.
