In this podcast episode, we interview Zachariah Moreno, Co-Founder and CEO of SquadCast, a cloud recording studio platform.
Zachariah discusses his mission to cultivate creative collaboration and how his journey from a podcast listener to an aspiring podcast creator led him to becoming to a software creator.
He also shares his insights into what B2B businesses need to consider when launching their own podcasts, and how SquadCast’s unique development enables creators to overcome internet struggles and achieve good recording quality anywhere around the world.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Zachariah Moreno – SquadCast
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Zachariah Moreno
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I’m joined by Zach Moreno. Now Zach is the co-founder and CEO of SquadCast, which is the tool that we’re recording the podcast on today. Welcome to the show, Zack.
Zachariah: Mike, appreciate you having me on. It’s an honour to be here.
Mike: It’s great. So, one of the first things you were obviously really smart when you started podcasts. About six years ago, you realised that podcasting was going to be big? I mean, what made you realise that podcasting was going to grow as quickly as it has done?
Zachariah: Yeah, I wish that I could kind of predict the future and see what was coming. That’d be great. From like a startup perspective, were more so for us came out of solving some of the challenges that we experienced firsthand when we tried to do not a startup but a creative side project in creating a very creative podcast, we want to do like a science fiction, audio drama, which has a lot of production workflow involved, big, you know, bigger teams like production value on and on, the catch for us was that we were a remote team spread out across California. And we had a lot of skills that would help somebody who creating a science fiction, audio drama, I still think we underestimated the amount of work respect to anybody who’s producing a science fiction, audio drama podcast, it is incredible.
But what we did was we set out to create this ambitious show, and quickly found that the quality of our vocals weren’t there compared to the rest of the production value, the rest of the sound design that you really need with something like a drama of a fictional podcast to kind of full immersion, right, that is what you’re trying to get with that sort of form of storytelling. But if the people sounded like they were recorded over the internet or over the phone, it sounds like it’s you’re not fooling anybody, right? You’re not You’re not fooling anybody that these people are actually in these scenarios and experiencing these things. So that was a real bummer for us. And it kind of stopped us in our tracks.
And a week or two later, we pivoted from doing the science fiction audio drama podcast to seeing if we could create some software that would allow people to kind of have their cake and eat it too, when it comes to getting that very high quality audio recordings for multiple people, without needing to be in the same physical recording studio. So we were really stoked on on podcasting, as like listeners, and my co founder rock introduced me to podcasting as a listener more on the nonfiction side of things, right, more and more traditional podcasts. Because I love learning. And it’s a very quick way to learn. So that’s kind of how I was a user of podcasts, through college and the end of high school. So that love really translated into jumping from being a listener to wanting to be a creator, to creating software that it helped other podcasters create.
And that’s really what SquadCast has become, yeah, now six years later, and we really sit at the intersection of, you know, to your point of your question, podcasting, but also this kind of trend of remote work, not needing to be in the same physical space to create quality content and grow an audience. So that’s really where SquadCast helps creators is that that added constraint of not being able to get in the same physical studio, like Mike, you’re on another continent from me right now. And yet, we’re going to sound like we’re having this conversation in the same room in the same studio. So that’s really the vision that we set out to do. And we’ve learned a lot along the way, because we’re really big on community. And in an industry full of people who speak for a living, our focus is listening, and listening to what the creators that we serve, are telling us that they need and want from a platform like SquadCast, a cloud recording studio is the category that we’ve set out to define. And we try to get out of the way as much as possible and build what people need. And that’s been that’s been a fun journey thus far.
Mike: So awesome. So I’m interested in you know, came from a problem, but it sounds like actually, in terms of your career, you’ve actually got a background in software talking about development, how do you build your career up to to end up founding and running a really cool company like SquadCast
Zachariah: Not a traditional path into startup land, I can say that for sure. I have a background kind of in fine art and going to art school, and then learning software engineering. I did an internship on the Chrome team at Google. And that’s really where I got kind of exposed and learned and indoctrinated to how Google builds software at scale for like, especially what’s important to me like my mission is to cultivate creative collaboration and technology on The Web especially, can do that in really magical ways like these very real time experiences where we’re collaborating with each other more in line with like, what you would expect from like a multiplayer video game, but applied to, you know, technology, B2B technology, SAS. And you get things like SquadCast, you get things like figma, or, you know, slack like these very real time, lots of people engaging with each other. And that’s really what I saw being built at Google and was something that was like very inspiring to me. Because I had experienced as like in my fine art career or any of the kind of phases in my career, I had experienced creativity being amplified and enhanced when multiple people collaborated with each other, like pair programming as a software engineer, or collaborating on a painting together, like John Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol did for like 200 paintings, right? Like, their creativity was amplified by each other. And you don’t really know where the creation is going to end up. At the end from when you start, you don’t know what the start what it’s going to end up like, because there’s this element of improv to it. Right. And that leads to very interesting places. So that’s my personal mission. And you can kind of see how that’s applied in SquadCast of creating quality audio and video content together with other people anywhere in the world.
While my background is less traditional, I come from, yeah, not really any, you know, middle class background, nobody in my family had ever really done a tech startup or anything like that there’s, you know, I don’t have like a dad or a grandma, who was like a venture capitalist or something. There needs to be more grandma, venture capitalists that just occurred to me right now. Yeah, there’s nothing like in my background, that would have said, Okay, this is an on ramp into startup land, other than I went to art school and studied design and user computer interaction, and then how advanced technology could bring new designs and new experiences to life. Just always try to stay at the bleeding edge of technology.
And that has really, you know, led to this place where if you had tried to create, if I had tried to create SquadCast, even a year before we did in 2016, let’s say 2015, or 2014, or something like that, we would have failed because the web platform and the web standards and the cloud and a bunch of these, like interdependent technologies just weren’t there. And that’s where the founders of Twitter originally founded a company called audio. And audio had an element of kind of SquadCast, it was I think it was solo recording, but and it was all flash based. So I mean, it was kind of bound to fail. But that’s how long ago people were, you know, been trying to figure out how to record remotely and have podcasts kind of be a first class citizen on the web. That’s how I look at my podcast is that it’s the internet of audio. And we can consume podcasts all day online. But how do you create a podcast online? It’s fairly easy to do if you’re solo, once you add a second, or a fifth person, how do you do that? Right? Like the internet kind of breaks down at a point, right? Where it’s just like, okay, I can consume, I think a lot about creation and consumption and the balance between the two and people’s lives, and you can consume all day. But creating is a different story, or at least it was before squat cast. So that’s where we’re trying to balance that out, make it as accessible to create this content as it is to consume this content.
Mike: I mean, that’s fascinating. Obviously, you do something quite different to say a zoom or teams in the, irrespective of internet quality, as far as I can tell, you get great quality recording. So can you explain that what SquadCast does differently and why it’s so much better for podcasts? Well, first,
Zachariah: Thank you for saying that. That’s, that’s really awesome to hear. That was totally, totally Our goal was to I mentioned kind of having our cake and eating it too. That’s exactly what we’re talking about is before SquadCast, the quality of the audio, let’s just keep it fairly simple. For audio. We do it with video and screen and stuff now too. Which is more complex, we can get into that if you like. But when it comes to audio, we just asked ourselves like where is it being degraded if I record a conversation with you over Skype was kind of the the one everybody used back when we got started. Now it’s more like zoom, stuff like that. Or phone like we just asked ourselves Where is the quality being degraded? Because if I stand with both people, if I’m sitting right next to you while you’re having a phone call, you sound perfectly fine to me, right? You sound as high quality as my ears can can hear. But if I listened to that same phone call, have you it’s way less than that. Why is that? Right? So we just tried to work our way backwards and say, Where’s the quality being degraded? How can we preserve that there are clearly choices that these engineers and designers are making behind the scenes of Skype or Zoom They’re clearly choices they’re making, that don’t preserve the quality. Sometimes it’s good quality, but we just kind of embraced reality and tried to work backwards. So the reality is, is the solution to this problem is not a better internet connection, right? Like, that’s just not what SquadCast is not an Internet service provider, I can’t like write any code that’s going to make your internet connection or my internet connection, or rather, your internet service provider give you what you’re paying for. I have a lot of thoughts around internet service providers and stuff. But I encourage people to do their research and check that they’re getting what they’re paying for their. Anyway, that’s not kind of the space that we can solve things in, right? We’re not going to go and create a new global infrastructure of copper wire or satellites or something like that. That’s cool if other people want to do that. Fantastic. But we thought we could just make different design choices, different engineering choices, all through this lens of this is a studio, this isn’t not a conversation.
So you can think about SquadCast as the exact opposite of an approach like Skype or zoom, where Skype and zoom, they’re focused on empowering, connecting you to have a conversation. That’s why they exist. And then there is a feature of recording that somebody added at some point. SquadCast is the other way around, we are a recording studio, that just so happens to have a feature of remote conversation. It’s a complete figure ground reversal. And what you get is much higher quality recording because all of our design decisions along the way, we are asking ourselves, does this raise or lower quality? Does this affect quality? Does this affect quality? And yeah, after a couple years of building and a couple of patents later, we’ve innovated and created technology that preserves the quality, yes, but then also addresses some of the challenges that come from quality files are bigger file sizes, they take up more space, right? They take longer to upload and download on our less than consistent network connections. So how do you do that reliably? Right? Like I could record for you, Mike, the highest quality audio file, but if it takes all day to upload doesn’t matter. It’s like the file never existed, right? It’s just like, it’s often the ether somewhere trying to do this task that it’ll never finish. And that’s that’s a real shame.
So our founding adviser Harry Duran asked the question, Well, do you really need to wait to upload until the files like complete? Like at the end? When you click stop? That was a really good question. And I still think about it today. Because we did not have an answer to it. It was like, it’s one of those things. That’s kind of obvious in hindsight. But before that, it’s like, well, of course, you can’t start uploading the file until you have a file. Right? That’s just what everything and all of my computer science classes have ever told me. But that’s not how inventions get invented. Right? That type of thinking is not how patents get written. So what what that led to is, you know, some unique technology to SquadCast that we have since patented, that is our recording engine, that’s what we call it now. And that features progressive upload, it also features cloud recordings as kind of like this layers of redundancy. And what that adds up for for SquadCasters and their guests is that what you said, whatever your internet connection is like today or during our conversation is not going to affect the quality.
So what we do is we actually separate those out if anybody is like a nerdy audio engineer, these are two independent signal chains from one another. So one stream of audio does not affect the other stream of audio. So we have the real time conversation you and I are experiencing right now. That’s going to fluctuate with the weather with my kids streaming twitch in the other room that’s going to fluctuate or a better example would be like my neighbour, right, like we are kind of interdependent in our connections to the internet. Things that are completely outside of my control shouldn’t affect my quality, right, they shouldn’t affect my audience’s experience of consuming my content. So that’s really where SquadCast, we just separate those two things out, we embrace that the conversation will fluctuate. Like, you know, people might get disconnected. And let’s try to reduce that down to as close to zero as we can. But let’s make sure people succeed no matter what even if the power goes out. Even if like, you know, things get unplugged, the network goes down. There’s a coronal mass ejection and all the satellites go down, right like anything, any disaster, we should be able to still succeed, even in those situations. And that’s really what you get is our recording engine that kind of gets you the quality but also very highly reliable in these less than reliable situations. Let’s say
Mike: No, it’s amazing. And it’s incredible how you know SquadCast is recording on your computer, not in the cloud, but it’s uploading all the time and magically when you finish it seems to be there like you was yeah, it was always recorded in the cloud.
Zachariah: It’s there’s another, there’s a, thank you. There’s a bunch of benefits to it, a lot of what I’ve spoken about, but it’s also super fast. Like, because it’s already up in the cloud, you don’t need to wait around your guests doesn’t need to leave their tab open for like an hour, right, which is a huge security issue. And I don’t know who can do that. Because you have another meeting, right? You have more to go on with your day. That’s not how SquadCast works SquadCast, you can just hit stop bounce, you can, you can bounce, like close the tab kill the computer. And we’ll have up to when you left in the source quality, in addition to the cloud quality, so what you said about cloud versus local, we do both. So SquadCast does both. And that’s where it’s like, okay, if you like zoom, fine. Those are like what our cloud record that’s like our cloud recordings. So you’ll always have those no matter what. But the local primaries show up 99 point something percent of the time, and what you’re saying very quickly.
So whatever your workflow is, if your producers on the other side of the world, right? What if you had to download that and then re upload it, or past attempts at Cloud recording that no longer exist anymore? Like, you’d actually, they didn’t have any upload component at the end, you asked your guest, hey, put this into my Dropbox or email it to me or whatever, you know, whatever kind of kludgy ways people glue together. So we think that like a guest on your show, should be like a guest at a dinner party, you don’t like ask them to like help you with the dishes, unless they liked doing dishes or cooking or something like that. They’re your guest. They shouldn’t have to, like, become a podcaster and figure out all this weird technology just to have an impact for your audience. So that’s really where the speed comes in, in addition to the reliability because yeah, we’re not waiting for anything to upload. It’s already in the cloud, where we can control the environment and give it as much horsepower as it needs to render that. Yeah, three hour long audio file for you and 10 other people in like, a few seconds.
Mike: Awesome. No, this was great. I mean, one of the things you’ve said a couple of times is you’ve called Scott Kosta recording platform rather than a podcasting platform. Can you talk about some of the other uses people put SquadCast to rather than just your classic podcast?
Zachariah: Yeah, yeah, it totally is. And this surprised us because we were very like podcast. And still, the vast majority of the creators that we serve today are professional podcasters. But we also listen, and that brings to light use cases of the platform that any technology, you don’t know how people are going to use it, right, there’s kind of the intended use case. But then there’s a whole bunch of other stuff, right that people do with things.
So one example is our largest customer by recording time, like just like a physical studio. That’s how our pricing works on SquadCast is recording hours, it’s just way cheaper, is an audiobook production company. So they produce at a scale that would be very difficult or even maybe impossible in a physical studio, in one city, they can produce lots of hours of audiobooks. In parallel daily, they have, they can scale their business because they can work with voice actors who are around the world, not just in their city, they can work with authors around the world, not just in their city, they can work with producers around the world, not just in their city, and be very efficient and high quality at that. So SquadCast, because our emphasis on audio quality is there it’s above the standards that something like Audible would require that you upload the audio that then people purchase and download on the audible platform. So Penguin Random House and auto VITA is the customer I just mentioned, that is you know, our largest customer by recording hours.
And then video is the other one that comes to mind is has been always kind of a force of nature online, right with YouTube. And and people prefer to consume video content. I think that data is clear. depends on the context, though. Because sometimes audio right, you don’t have your eyes while you’re driving, for instance, or something like that.
So that’s where we were surprised how many podcasters how many of our customers were asking us for video recordings, our most requested feature by far like to a painful degree. And what we were trying to figure out was like, should we even do this? Like, this doesn’t seem like why we got into this business, but that’s fine. You know, we’re open to learning and new opportunities, so that that answer became quick to answer but like, how are podcasters going to use this house as part of their workflow? Do they really know what’s all involved like with lighting and camera and it’s a whole another degree of like file storage, the size of the files, all that stuff? Right? So we were just trying to figure out okay, does our approach to our recording engine that we were just discussing, does that work for video too? And I think it inspired a lot of people because SquadCast was even in our beta from day one. SquadCast has had video for the real time conversation so that we have body language and eye contact That is something like 70% of human communication is nonverbal. So we knew from like really early on that, even if it’s just for communication, that’s, that’s going to be better for the conversation for the final product. If we can see each other. If we want to, of course, you can turn it off, and it can feel more like a phone call. That’s cool, too. There’s other features you can like, hide yourself. And there’s there’s a bunch of options there. But like, video was an interesting one to us. And yeah, now people record lots of videos like on the SquadCast platform, and I think in the next version of SquadCast, video recording will even be more accessible to the creators that that we have the privilege to serve.
So so how people are using those videos is for a lot of marketing purposes, like to tease the episode to have content to share on social media, maybe in advance of the full on conversation being released on the podcast. So you can think of it kind of like a funnel, right? Where those clips are easier to digest in places and expose them to people in more places on social and elsewhere. And that’s kind of like the appetiser, right and then the podcast is like the full the full entree, you might have bonus content. And that would be like the dessert. I guess it’d be another way to, to say it. Yeah.
So that’s a lot of the use cases that we see there are more, but I think those are the big ones in addition to podcasting, and podcasters overall, have been embracing video a lot lately. And there’s a lot of conversation around a Spotify, launching video podcast, YouTube, embracing podcasting more, we’ll just more broadly Google with Google podcasts. And then a lot of YouTubers, instead of saying on my YouTube channel, they say my podcast and I find that interesting, because it’s purely semantics. But it seems like that’s kind of a trend that I don’t think anybody could have predicted. But SquadCast, we don’t have opinions about where the content that you record with us ends up. It’s up to you. It’s just audio and video content. So anywhere you want to create and publish audio and video content, we’ve had it end up in lots of places that we’re very proud to serve those creators.
Mike: I love that concept of really, like trying to serve every place. I mean, I guess one, one sort of content that, you know, seems to be gaining momentum, particularly amongst podcasters is streaming. Is that something you’ve looked at offering as part of SquadCast? Yeah,
Zachariah: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I mean, a bit of a different workflow, a bit of a wild ride to be on, you know, some live streams, you got to keep it you got to keep it moving. There’s a lot of vamping, right, there’s a lot of like, interesting dynamics that come with live. So we’ve been paying attention to live for a while now and talking to our creators to have that opportunity to listen, you know, is that something that you’re finding traction with? You’re growing your audience? Does it fit into your workflow? Is it sustainable, it can demand a lot of us to show up at the same bat time, the same bet our whatever that saying is I just butchered so like, that’s where I think we’re in the Listening phases. And then in the next major version of SquadCast, you’ll see kind of our take on that. I think we don’t ever want to just add things because others are we want to find opportunities to do things different and innovate. We didn’t get into this business to just build something that already existed. That’s a waste of everybody’s time.
Mike: That’s awesome and exciting. I’d be interested to see what will the new version of SquadCast looks like? guess one of the things for the listeners here is, you know, the listeners that typically from the B2B side, which can be quite hard with very small, very focused audiences. I mean, do you have tips for people working in B2B in terms of how they can develop and grow their podcast audience?
Zachariah: I do. And it’s a category that we’ve been seeing grow and gain traction in interesting ways. So there’s like, internal podcasts that companies have been embracing, especially through the pandemic, like when your team is fully remote? How do you do corporate communications? How do you continue to keep everybody moving in the same direction? Podcasts and recording those long form conversations are great for teams that find themselves in that situation. And I know everybody’s mind probably jumps to the pandemic. And that was a window of time.
But I would submit to you that like, organisations like ESPN and Google, and like global organisations, they have lots of offices all over the world. And sure those people were not working from home. But a co worker who works in a different office in a different city than you is also relatively remote, right. So this problem existed for a long time did not just happen because of the pandemic. And a lot of those companies we’ve had the privilege of working with before the pandemic like ESPN has been doing their daily show with us for years now. Records lots of content with us and they have like ESPN support this In Mexico, they have their offices up in Seattle, even if everybody’s in office that they’re still remote from each other, how do producers and talent collaborate with each other from from those places.
So that’s really interesting to us and is a use case for for businesses, that is less talked about SquadCast, we serve professional content creators. And one of the first things that we observed was, people immediately think of like, oh, the content is the product and the content is monetized. And that is how you are making money. That’s why you’re a business, and therefore a professional, but businesses that podcast for their marketing, and don’t don’t monetize the content itself, but they have another business model that the podcast feeds into. Right. So more traditionally, kind of part of content marketing, to feed into your business. So if you’re a dentist, you have your dental practice, that’s how you monetize, that’s your product. But then it’s a different question, how do I get customers into my business? And how can a podcast serve my content strategy there, and it can in lots of ways, so I think that the nature of long form conversations and really getting to know people, is something that people audiences are very hungry for in a world where everything is shifting in the opposite direction where everything is short form, and very surface level and paper thin. Podcasting stands in stark contrast to that and offers this three hour long conversations where you can really get to know people and have deep conversations. And in that process, demonstrate a level of expertise, and insight and consideration, where you can grow relationships with people who may be already our current customers nurturing the relationship with current customers, so that they’re more familiar with your story, like, do you know your dentist founding story? I don’t. Right, but like, I might trust them a little bit more with my teeth if I did.
Right. So that’s kind of kind of one example. And it gives you a place to have conversations with other people to lend their expertise as well. And that leads to authority building, and can be a differentiator in your marketing strategy compared to other people in your space. So we see companies embracing podcasting, generally in those two, those two ways. But there’s also the emergence of companies that content is their product. And, and that’s fascinating to us, as well. So lots of ways that companies can embrace podcasting, a lot has been said, if you if you Google, like companies, podcast marketing, you’re gonna very quickly find this word repeated over and over and over again, intimacy, podcasting gives you intimacy, you’re, you have full access to the hearing sensory experience of your audience for as long as they’re listening to you. And therefore it is intimate. I don’t think so there’s a lot of research that shows that, like USC is the study that that I’ll cite more, more explicitly that the audience directly correlates the quality of the content that they’re consuming with the credibility of the people that they’re listening to. So if the whole goal here is to build authority and relationships with customers and you know, have this intimacy, but we’re not focusing on our quality, you’re actually degrade and you’re losing credibility. It’s like, you’re you’re trying to build it in all these ways. But then you have this, this hole in your bucket. Right. So that’s really where the quality and a recording platform like SquadCast can help you scale that quality and not need to travel and things like that, to get your production out on the cadence that your audience comes to expect it weekly, or bi weekly, or whatever your cadence is. So I think that intimacy is just doesn’t come for free, we have to cultivate it, right? We have to make sure that we are upholding that quality. And that’s going to lead to the intimacy of having these long form conversations.
Mike: That’s fascinating that the importance of quality, I think, is something you can’t underestimate with podcasts. One thing a lot of people might be wondering, listening is, you know, perhaps they listen to podcasts, they’d like to launch a podcast for their company. It’s really easy to do I mean, you put your email address in SquadCast, and you can pretty much go but what are the mistakes people are going to make? If they don’t think about it? What are the things that they should have?
Zachariah: There are a lot it is easy to your point to get going which is fantastic. And you know, proud that we’ve played a part in that I’m proud to know a lot of people and get to work with a lot of people like the description the captivates and Buzzsprout of the world who are making it more approachable, right? That’s fantastic because that was not always the case. If you look at the birth of podcasting, it was very, very nerdy, very like old white guy in the basement internet pirate radio right and could figure out and glue together all these technologies. I I used to hand code my RSS feed, like, cool, man. What did that do for anybody? Yeah. So that’s really where things have evolved, right? Where people in my family can just on their phone, start a podcast, solo with other people narrative drama, whatever. The problem is that you quickly realised that podcasting is actually if you want to take it seriously, and you want to be a professional.
If the word monetization ever flows through your head, I think you should consider yourself a professional. And then ask yourself, what is my business, then you’re basically a if you don’t see it as a hobby, and it’s totally fine to be a hobby, I’m not knocking it, I’ve started a hobby podcast. I know a bunch of people who do, that’s totally fine. But don’t worry about monetization. If it happens, fantastic. Great. But like, that’s not why you’re doing it, right. But if you are trying to monetize your podcast, which a lot of people are, you’re running a media startup, not a podcast, a podcast is how you actually distribute your product, your product is the content that you’re creating audio, maybe video as well. And then is that content so valuable, that people are going to pay you for it, sometimes probably, we can get it there.
There’s a bunch of strategy to do that. But this is less and less sounding like putting audio up on the internet and more and more like running a SaaS business, right. And especially with the monetization options that Apple and Spotify have contributed somewhat recently with, like premium subscriptions, right, you can pay a creator monthly to get access to a private feed that is not public. And you get access to that premium content, in addition to whatever they put out for free, which again, is starting to sound like a funnel, right? So that’s where we see creators embracing these new technologies, experimenting with it in service of their monetization journey. But this is you’re running a SaaS business at that point, your products, just not software, it’s content. And what about churn and what about B, and like, all these other ways that people talk about subscription business models, those apply to you. And I know, we want to create, right, that’s why we got into this, I’m a creator, I wish I could just like paint all day, or do sculpture or whatever. But that’s not monetization, nobody’s necessarily gonna, like pay me for my painting that I just spent a week doing. That’s a really hard problem to solve. And just because we have audio on the internet now doesn’t mean that that age old problem of artists figuring out how to get paid, has been solved magically by the Internet gods, right? It’s the same work. It’s the same challenge. And you quickly realise that talking into a microphone and publishing it on an RSS feed and talking to your listeners on a slack or discord. That’s part of the job. There’s a bunch of jobs, right? You got to market that podcast, you got to get guests on your show, are you going to do ad deals? What about the technology needed to like do that premium subscription feed that I mentioned, or your Patreon? Who is going to create that premium content? Right? This is a company there are lots of, there are lots of roles, and one person can do a company startups do that all the time.
So I’m not trying to discourage anybody from doing it. I did that right. That’s how SquadCast started was a side project as a startup. So there’s a tonne of parallels that I’ve talked about a lot, both here today. And in other podcasts that I’ve done, what’s the parallels between running a startup and doing a podcast are many, and I would encourage people if they’re interested in monetization, to think about it in those ways.
Big caveat, though, we just talked about companies that podcast and have a separate business model, right? They’re already running a business. So the podcast is additive to that, right? They can think of it as another marketing channel. A couple of differences, though, they own it. It’s not like Facebook, where somebody else owns it, you own it. And there’s no kind of like censorship, at least today, there’s a couple of different characteristics to it that are different than other forms of media, right? Like a YouTube channel can be removed from the platform, a podcast can’t, it just can’t because it’s decentralised from any one platform provider. So that’s why it may be attractive to businesses. And in their case, they probably already have a team and already a business model and stuff like that. Right. So the podcast is more just about like the workflow and how does it fit into a sustainable marketing cadence?
Mike: That’s amazing. I mean, Zack, this has been brilliant. I really appreciate it. If anybody is interested in having a go at podcasting, I strongly recommend they go to SquadCast.fm where they can go try SquadCast and start recording, or indeed, if they’ve got other projects. Zach, it’s been amazing.
Zachariah: It’s been a fun conversation. And as you said, we’d love to support and create creators at any phase of their journey, whether that’s just you know, learning from the content or webinars or podcasts that we do. Free for the community. We invest in the community in a bunch of different ways and We’re very accessible to continue helping in that effort. And yeah, if you’re recording remotely, we’d love to support you and help you with a cloud recording studio that’s going to serve you in the ways that we’ve discussed today.
Mike: Thank you, Zach. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
