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In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Craig Hewitt of Castos, about the unique set of challenges to starting and growing a SaaS product as a non-technical founder.
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Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show, we cover topics relating to building and growing startups in an ambitious, but in a sustainable and repeatable fashion. These are not the typical Silicon Valley startups, where fundraising can be a goal in itself, and where people build slide decks instead of building businesses. We want to be meticulous, disciplined, and have a way to repeat our success instead of relying on so much luck and so many things to come together that it’s a one in a thousand chance. We want to build real businesses with real customers who pays real money.
In this week’s episode, I speak with Craig Hewitt about how he went from his day job, to running a product-type service, to running a fast growing SaaS application called Castos; all this as a non-technical founder. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 459.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth start up or you’re working on your first. I’m Rob and today with Craig Hewitt, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made on our journeys.
Thanks for joining me this week. I’m excited to talk to Craig Hewitt. You may know him from his podcast, RogueStartups, where he has chronicled his journey over the past several years. If I recall correctly, that’s where I first heard about Craig. What I like about Craig is he has been doing this for years, 4½ years ago, he started a productized consulting service.
Two years later, he quit his day job. He acquired a WordPress plugin, he started Castos, which SaaS app for podcasts hosting. He’s built it up to the point where he has four full time employees, two part time employees and he’s part of our inaugural TinySeed batch.
You’re going to enjoy the conversation with Craig. We dive into a lot of stuff that he hasn’t talked about on his podcast and per the interviews I’ve been doing recently, I try to dig into some points in particular and not just cover a broad story, but really look at the important points along his journey, things he learned, advice that you can take away to help you build and grow your startup as well.
I want to do a little experiment this week, it’s something I haven’t done before. I talked to Craig offline and said, “You know? I bet folks will listen to this episode and they might have questions for you.” Whether it’s a question about how you did it, about your journey, about podcasting, about startups in general, just anything that you would like to hear Craig and I riff on and talk about, or frankly if it’s just for Craig, that’s okay too. I want to invite him back in probably two, maybe three weeks, and any questions that have been submitted, he and I can run through on the show. It’s a Q&A episode, but it’s a Q&A episode with a guest host and you have context about his experience.
As you listen to this episode, please try to think of a question or two for Craig and then email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and you can send that as a text question or attach it, Dropbox link to an MP3, or you can just call our voicemail number if you’re on your phone right now. It’s (888) 801-9690 and I’d love to have Craig back on the show, assuming we get questions, and we can run through those.
It could be an interesting and fun experiment to have these guests to come on the show, not just tell their story but also offer practical advice and tips. This is something I’ve been talking about for quite some time about how I’ve enjoyed a Q&A episodes because it allows all of us to be smarter.
The fact that I’m here on the microphone, talking in answering questions is good and I’ve been able to share knowledge along with Mike Taber for the past nine plus years. The community and everyone out there, collectively, we are all smarter if more of us can weigh in on these topics. I love to pull guests back on the show and do questions, so please do send any in, questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, if you have any questions for Craig. Maybe put “Question for Craig” in the subject line, that’ll help me catalog them. Let’s dive into the interview with Craig, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Craig: thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Craig: My pleasure. Thanks from me on, Rob.
Rob: I bet a lot of folks know who you are from your RogueStartups podcast. You’ve been known for several years—congrats on that, by the way—so many podcasts don’t even make it 20 or 30 episodes and you guys are at 170 something?
Craig: Yeah we’ll be at 200 around the end of the year.
Rob: Good for you. On these milestone episodes, everyone always tries to do something cool and interesting and I always find it hard to come up with new things. Have you been given thought to what you might do on that episode?
Craig: We have thought about it. We did a really cool episode at 100. It was a mash up of a bunch of little interviews that Dave did at MicroConf two years ago. We might do something similar to that, just talking about a little bit of everything, founder stories, lessons learned, stuff like that. I think those are really neat.
Rob: That’s cool. I was asking you because our 500th episode is coming up and I wanted to steal your idea and do it before you even do it. Of course I wouldn’t do that.
Craig: You’re welcome.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. The reason I wanted to have you on the show today well, there are many reasons, but one is you’re a non-technical founder who has built a successful SaaS app. Successful to the point that you have four full-time employees, two part-time, TinySeed, we backed you, you’re part of our inaugural TinySeed batch. Stuff’s really been going up into the right for you for a couple years now with Castos.
I wanted to walk through that story because starting a SaaS app is hard enough. Starting a SaaS app as a non developer, there are unique challenges with it. I want to take people back to where you started.
Now, you live in Annecy, France with your family, but you’re from the States. You were living in New Orleans, if I recall, and you were working a day job as a sales guy. Is that right?
Craig: Yes. I’m the dreaded sales guy at heart, which is actually a really nice thing. If you’re not a developer, you have to be a salesperson or a marketer. That’s what I bring to the table I guess, but yeah, I was in enterprise-level medical sales, so selling stuff the hospitals and doctors.
I started the podcast, started RougeStartups just really as a fan of entrepreneurship, software, SaaS, and stuff like that, online business. Ironically, that’s what led to my first business that was any kind of success. It’s called PodcastMotor, we do podcast editing and production, we’re a productized service. That’s what led me to quit my day job. We traveled the world for a little bit and ended up living in France. Then all the opportunities with Castos came along as a result of that. Podcasting has been the door through which all of this stuff has opened up to me.
Rob: Podcasting has been a great thread for you. Obviously, you’ve listened to podcasts for years, then you started your own, then you started a productized service that does podcast editing, and you have a quite a client list. As you said, PodcastMotor allowed you to quit your day job. Then, you have acquired a WordPress plugin that will get to podcasting and then turn that into a SaaS. It’s not often you actually see a thread like that where there are 4-5 different levels in the same space.
I do think that’s been one of your super powers is you haven’t wandered all over the place. You had invoicing software, then an SEO tool, then email service provider, and started a conference. You’d be an idiot to do something like that and wander all over the place. You have just been focused, but you’ve been able to do it in a much more succinct timeline. When did PodcastMotor start?
Craig: PodcastMotor started 4½ years ago. The very beginning of 2015.
Rob: You were working at a day job and you’re good at sales, presumably, that’s what you’re doing at 40-50 hours a week. The PodcastMotor process involved that super power, I’m guessing. There was a lot of demos in sales because it’s several hundred dollars a month for you to produce episodes for folks. I’m imagining, everybody wanted to get on a phone call. Did you find that that asset of being a salesperson and being comfortable with demos helped you a lot getting PodcastMotor off the ground?
Craig: Absolutely. At first, I was doing the sales calls, doing the editing, doing the writing, publishing to the hosting platforms and stuff, and then we built a team around it. For a very long time, actually up until just about a month ago, I’ve been doing all the sales calls. Just because I’m really good at it, we close a lot of customers, and like you said, we’re really fortunate to be able to work with a lot of the podcast that people that listen to the show probably have heard of.
It’s really cool. It’s been a really nice experience to be able to have relationships with folks like that, too, that we’re on a first name basis and able to email up a whole lot of these power players especially in our space.
Rob: PodcastMotor grew to the point where you were able to quit your day job and then fund other stuff you’re doing. Was there a point in the first, let’s say, 12-18 months where you were like, “Oh, […]. This isn’t going to work,” or, “Man, this is really hard right now,” or was it one of those Cinderella stories that I often say don’t exist?
My famous quote is, “Even in the Cinderella stories, blah, blah, blah, and there are no Cinderella stories.” I’ve been saying that. I don’t recall PodcastMotor being that hard for you to get off the ground. I guess, to summarize, what was the hardest part or the lowest point as you were building that?
Craig: It was both. It was really successful really quickly, which in a service business is really hard, because in a SaaS business, if you make it and a bunch of people sign up, there’s no more work for you other than maybe support. PodcastMotor is a relatively complex one to scale the team up, create all these processes, documentation, workflows and stuff to be able to handle to go from 5 customers to 30 is really hard. It was not hard in the fact that the business floundered, but that the business was successful, which is its own problems. That was the challenge. For a long time, I loathe the business because it was just a constant game of catch-up.
Now, I have a lot more respect for it because productized service model is absolutely fantastic for folks who are out there and they’re consulting or they have a day job and they want to quit their day job and go out on their own. There’s no faster, more clear way to do it than a productized service. There are some downsides, like scalability is a lot harder, but for folks who just want to quit their day job, there’s nothing better because it’s pretty simple.
Rob: I’ve never run a productized consulting… actually that’s not true. CMSthemer was that and that was a constant pain in my ass. I had a bunch of other stuff for products and CMSthemer was bringing in more revenue than a lot of them, but it was this constant back-and-forth with clients and I didn’t have enough volume to hire the staff to do it, so I was doing it a lot of it myself. Were you working the day job, then you’d come home and then you just work four, five, or six hours at night to keep up before you had the bandwidth to hire someone to replace yourself?
Craig: Absolutely, and that’s the hardest part in any business. Whether it’s a productized service or it’s a SaaS business, that time when you’re making a few thousand bucks to even $10,000 MRR is just really hard because you don’t have the time or the money to really do anything. That’s why stuff like TinySeed is really cool because your sweet spot with TinySeed is to take these folks that are that $5000 or even $10,000 and say, “Okay, stop messing around with your day job, go all in on this, and really dedicate yourself to marketing, or hire someone from marketing, or hire a developer, so you can go do marketing or something.”
That is the point that probably a lot of folks get burnt out on is, “I have all of these demands on my time and my mental energy and my stress is through the roof,” because yeah, you’re working a day job and you have family or whatever, then you come home, work on this, and there’s a fire to put out every day. If there’s no light at the end of the tunnel in some way, then it’s just really depressing sometimes, which is weird because then, you have this growing business that is making you depressed. It’s a strange thing, but that’s how it was.
Rob: Yeah, there’s so much to be said for the power of focus. The ability to just focus on one thing and not have a day job and side projects in addition to whatever it is you’re doing, and to your point about folks who have $5000 MRR or sub-$10,000 MRR and are depressed, shutting business down. I’ve seen that over and over and I’ve seen folks trying to do it nights and weekends for years, unable to get it past that point where they are able to quit the day job. It’s a real shame.
There are businesses that could have succeeded or could succeed faster if they just had a little more time and a little more of their best energy, the good glucose. Not the, “I just worked in an eight- or nine-hour day from my day job. Now, I commute home and I have three or four hours.” Even if I’m a developer and I can write the code, you’re just so tired, you’re not as productive, and you don’t get in the flow. There’s a lot to be said there.
Can you give us an idea of how large PodcastMotor is? I know you don’t talk about your top line revenue. Have you ever talked about number of clients or any idea, maybe even employee headcount? Something to give us an idea of the scope of the business?
Craig: We do about $30,000 a month and most of it is recurring.
Rob: That’s cool. How long after you started PodcastMotor were you able to basically quit the day job?
Craig: About two years.
Rob: Did it take that long to get to the point where it could provide a full-time income for you or were you working a job and also banking extra money in preparation for that event?
Craig: It was a little bit of both, it was more that we had wished we had a day in mind. We had a day in mind for a really long time, almost a year. My wife and I agreed, with some stuff with the kids and them finishing preschool, we wanted to quit around the summer so we could travel to Europe for three months. We just had a day in mind and the day included some personal stuff. It included PodcastMotor getting to a certain size so it could provide for us. I was in sales, so you’re making pretty good money which was allowing us to save up for this transition time, too.
Rob: I know it grew pretty well from the start. I almost would have thought the productized consulting given how quickly it can scale up, would’ve allow you to quit your day job before two years. It sounds like it would have if you really were desperate.
Back in 2008, I was just clawing and scratching to get out of the day job. The moment that I was able to, I quit If you had done it at the moment, that you had enough income to do it, it sounds like it would have been a lot sooner.
Craig: Totally. I mean, I’m always been reinvesting more back into the business than maybe I have to, and it’s venture for both Castos and PodcastMotor where the businesses don’t throw off as much profit as they could certainly, but I’m just always oriented towards growth. We were hiring team members, getting people in place, and doing all these things to where I didn’t get as much money. When I had a day job, I didn’t “need it,” but if I had to quit my day job or if I’d gotten fired, we could have lived off PodcastMotor pretty early on.
Rob: The next thing I want to touch on is your acquisition of a WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. This is a plugin that folks who run WordPress or want to run a podcast, they install the plugin and then when they do a new post, it allows them to upload an MP3 file and have that go into an RSS feed in iTunes, settings and all that stuff.
To the listeners, we on Startups for the Rest of Us were on PodPress for ages and it was abandoned. It did the similar functionality and it was abandoned six years ago. We just never upgraded because you just don’t do these things. You came in and generously offered to migrate us to Seriously Simple Podcasting. We’ve been on it now for about a month or two and really enjoying the more modern interface, the maintained code base, and all the things that we were lacking with PodPress.
This very podcast that runs on that plugin, but you didn’t build that, you acquired it. I wanted to dig in a little bit on that story. Namely, when did it happen in this timeline? Right now, we’re at two years after starting PodcastMotor, you’ve quit your day job. Did the acquisition happen before or after that? How did it come about? Just talk us through that process.
Craig: I had already quit my day job, we’re already in France, and it came about just an email from actually one of our PodcastMotor customers who is also in the WordPress space, emailed me and said, “Hey, the guy who’s the original creator of this plugin is selling it because he’s going to work at Automatic, the parent company of WordPress. I think you should talk to him. This sounds like a pretty interesting fit for what you’re already doing with PodcastMotor.”
I talked to Hugh Lashbrooke, the guy that wrote the plugin. Pretty quickly he was like, “Yep, this is a good fit because you’re a reasonable person, already in the space, you’ll probably take good care of it,” and we saw it as a way to expand what we’re already doing with PodcastMotor as a service business getting into a product business and SaaS, and the idea was always to build a hosting platform to connect to the plugin. The plugin, like all plugins in the WordPress repository, is entirely free and will always be entirely free. Now, the Castos hosting platform is an optional add-on to the plugin and we use the traffic flow and the lead gen from WordPress like our main source of business.
Rob: Did you think from the start, when you are evaluating the purchase of the plugin, was it in the back of your mind like this is going to be good traffic and lead gen flow to a SaaS app someday?
Craig: No, it was dumb luck. Very fortunately, but it turns out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.
Rob: That’s the thing. If I’ve learned anything doing all the entrepreneurship stuff, the podcasting, and being in public is doing things in public creates opportunity. I don’t care whether you’re blogging about things, whether you’re podcasting, whether you’re actually have a productized business, a productized consulting business like you do where you have a SaaS app, if you had not started a podcast then decided to do PodcastMotor, you would never have gotten that email. No one would pick you out of the blue and it happened to be, “Oh, this guy’s already in the podcast.” There was some warm relationships there, there was a recommendation by someone saying, “Hey, he’ll take good care of it because we already know he’s proven this and that.”
I often give this advice to folks who can’t ship, or who are either have been working on something for years, or thinking about it or, “I just don’t know what to do to start,” I often say, “Just start podcasting or start writing. Even if you want to ultimately do software products just get out in the world, build a small tool and ship it. Help bloggers, help podcasters, help developers, something that gets you out in the world and has your name in the footer.” You’ll be shocked at how many of these little things come along just from being out there.
Craig: One of the things we all discount too much is just the value of your relationships with human beings, talking to them on the phone, and meeting them in person and stuff. We go to conferences, like MicroConf, or like […] Conf, or whatever maybe once a year and you meet up with all of your online friends. That’s really great, but I think that, especially if you’re talking about developing business acumen and a real network, that we should all take this a lot more seriously than most of us do. I was definitely on that boat. I was like, “I have my computer and run a business.” Now, I could run a really good business without a computer and just talk to people and work it like a regular business, where it’s all the relationships and the people that operate in the business and that I know in the industry and stuff. It’s an interesting flip that that’s taken.
Rob: I’ve totally seen that in my career as well. A lot of it starts with nuts and bolts, providing a service in marketing in a funnel, split testing, and then at a certain point there’s a lower leverage activities for you now because now it’s working relationships, it’s building partnerships, it’s shaking hands, and like you said, at an event that can get you hundreds of customers right off the bat rather than grinding it out with AdWords as the case may be.
To give listeners an idea of maybe the magnitude of the plugin, I know you haven’t talked about purchase price, you don’t have to name an exact number but to give listeners just some context what realm of numbers did you pay for Seriously Simple Podcasting.
Craig: I paid mid-four figures for the plugin, and at the time it was an entirely free plugin with some add-on modules which are also free and had about between 10,000 and 20,000 active installs in WordPress.
Rob: That sounds like a good deal to me.
Craig: Yeah, it was a great deal.
Rob: Long term, knowing what it turned into, obviously was a genius maneuver that I know you architected from the start.
Craig: Oh yeah.
Rob: From day one, I knew it. But even then, it sounds like that was a good exchange. You acquire this plugin, this is your first exposure to WordPress. I know you’ve used it as a podcast host or whatever, but you first time owning and operating a plugin, how long after the acquisition did you think we should build a SaaS app to back this thing?
Craig: That was always the idea, was to buy the plugin, to build a hosting platform on top of it because the model had already been proven. There’s another player in the space that does a very similar thing. I think we do it better, but there’s someone else that already does the exact same thing, basically. Our idea was, “If there’s already a player doing this in a certain way, I think we can do it better, because there are some things about that tool that I don’t like and a lot of other people don’t like.” That was the idea from the beginning.
Rob: And the rest is history, to be honest. You build Castos, it’s a SaaS app, a big channel has been your WordPress stuff. I know you have a lot of other channels at this point growing the company. Castos is about 2½ years old, four full-time, two-part time folks. Successful SaaS app on all metrics and I know your MRR—we won’t announce it here on the show—but it’s successful by any measure.
I’m curious, there’s a couple questions I have for you. The first is, podcast hosting is a very competitive and almost I say quasi-commoditized space, there are a lot of them. It’s commoditized in the way that email service providers are. There’s differentiation. It’s not truly a commodity, but there are just so many that you could go out and throw a rock and hit three. What made you think that you could enter that space just 2½ years ago after there are already as many as there were and gain enough traction to build a real business on it?
Craig: Even now and for sure back then, the thing that sets us apart from most all other players is the plugin and our WordPress integration. It makes managing your podcast content just so easy. It is Seriously Simple Podcasting. All joking aside, you just go into WordPress, you create a post, you upload the file, and your podcast is live as opposed to, “I’m going to log into Libsyn, I’m going to go over here, upload the file, then I get this iframe code which is all janky, then take it back to my WordPress site, make sure the post is published at the same time and all this kind of stuff.” There’s none of that. You just manage all your content wherever you’re managing all of your content already, which for a lot of people is WordPress.
I still believe that if I wasn’t the owner of Castos, I would still use it because it’s the best tool for my workflow, because I use WordPress for all of my sites. I manage all of my content in WordPress, so it’s the obvious tool and I would tell anyone else that. If you have a site on WordPress and you want to start a podcast, it’s just the clear, easy, good way to go.
That’s our competitive advantage. I think we have a pretty good moat around that. It would be hard for somebody to create a plugin that does as much as we do, get the traction, the name recognition and everything. I’m sure somebody could and maybe somebody will after hearing this, and that’s cool. Competition is healthy, it validates the space a lot, but that at this point, we’re a long way down that road, so it’s a pretty defendable competitive advantage for us.
Rob: Early mover advantage with stuff like WordPress plugins, SEO. I often think of WordPress plugins just as another form of SEO. If you get a plugin with a bunch of five-star reviews in the WordPress plugin repository, then you appear at or near the top of the search results when people search for podcast plugin. It just dumps hundreds or thousands of people through your funnel. And it’s a free funnel, so it’s not like they’re eating your website, but they’re downloading the plugin and then from there, you nurture them. This is a playbook where we’re seeing folks do, whether they’re moving them towards the premium plugin add-ons to a free one or towards a SaaS app as you’ve done.
Craig: Free like a puppy Rob. WordPress and WordPress plugins are not free.
Rob: Indeed.
Craig: It’s an expensive channel to maintain, but a very high-quality one.
Rob: Yeah, no doubt. Again, coming back to non-technical founder, you don’t write code, but you’re a more technical person than most salespeople that I’ve met. It probably comes from you selling medical devices. You have that left-brain edge and I know that you’re savvy with some of the tech stuff, just not a coder yourself. I’m curious what the hardest thing has been for you as a non-technical founder building and maintaining a SaaS app?
Craig: I know that Jonathan, our early developer for Castos, listens to this podcast so he’s going to laugh when he hears this. At the beginning, it was just him and I. He’s been our developer since day one. He started about two weeks after we acquired the plugin. We have had quite the journey of how we communicate, how we plan, how we work together, and it’s just been really challenging. It’s not anything to do with him because he’s actually been really great and gracious and forgiving of me.
For most non-technical folks, learning how to communicate effectively, and maybe efficiently is the right word, with developers is the hardest part. They speak a different language, but just being really, really clear the first time about what you want to build and why, what the user experience is going to be and all of these things.
Even to a developer that is a western person, that native English is their first language—Jonathan is both of those, he’s from South Africa—even though I would consider him a really, really good senior developer, I would come and say, “Hey, I want to go build this thing,” and he would go build it. I would come back and say, “This is not what I meant,” and he would say, “Yeah, that’s what you said.” So, just some of those things. It’s not even just scoping a feature. It’s how we track, report, decide which bugs to fix, in what order, prioritize the workload and stuff. All of this project management stuff is just really challenging. At this point, we do a pretty good job of it, but for the first year at least, it was just fires every day.
Rob: Can you give me an example of one time that you remember where you feel like you really struggled and basically did an example of what you’re talking about?
Craig: I can’t think of an example, but the classic thing, actually I’ve heard Hiten Shah talk about this recently. He calls it dropping Hiten bombs. He’ll just come in and say, “Hey, we should do this thing sometime,” and then the person that “works” for you says “Wow, Hiten or Craig, thinks that’s a really important thing. I should go do that.” That’s the biggest specific challenge for me, is organizing my thoughts and my product road map into something that’s really predictable and clear, and that we can all follow in the same way, not just scattered message and Slack every day, and changing directions on a whim. That’s just an impossible way to work. Getting over that has been huge.
Rob: I can see that. It’s amazing that if you’re like me—you and I are similar in personality—you view yourself as a scrappy founder who just wants to get stuff done, worked a day job, you built something, you’re the same person you were 10 years ago, but you’re not viewed that way by the people you hire. When you have a team and whether it’s 4 or 40 people, you still feel like you can just brainstorm like you did back in the day with a co-founder or with a mastermind group, “Yeah, I’m thinking about doing this, this, and that.”
You’re right. The Hiten bomb concept, I’ve seen it over and over with founders of you throw out an idea and it just train wrecks everybody or your thought process is really anxiety-provoking. It can be really anxiety provoking. If you say something one day and then change your mind the next day and you’re like, “No, it was just a brainstorm. It was just something I was thinking.” Folks don’t know that, and they’re trying to get a job done. I wonder, is that just learning to be a manager? A boss? Or is it learning to be communicating with developers? Maybe both.
Craig: It’s definitely more of the former. Also being more mature. I hate to say that because I’m going to be 40 next year. I need to chill out a little bit about some of these stuff and say, “Okay, the house is not on fire. We have a really great product and plugin, and everything is super stable. If I can just keep my mouth shut for another two weeks until the sprint is over, then we can talk about this.” That’s where I am these days.
Rob: As we move towards wrapping up, it seems like a tangent question or whatever, but I know that especially folks who listen to RougeStartups or maybe who have their own podcast and are building their own product on the side might be wondering, do you feel RougeStartups as your podcast you’ve been hosting for many years, do you feel like that’s had an impact on your ability to launch and grow Castos.
Craig: Totally, and I think in two ways. One is that, it is what first got me into PodcastMotor which is the door that got me into running my own businesses and was the introduction that got us into Seriously Simple Podcasting. The other reason probably is the more applicable to everybody, is that it really is honed to my niche expertise. I am pretty knowledgeable about podcasting because I run a podcast and I run a productized service around podcasting where we help a lot of really good podcasters run their podcast. Now, I run a SaaS app and a WordPress plugin around podcasting.
I just have a lot of domain expertise around this. The show itself, probably like Startups for the Rest of Us, is a really good channel to get your name out and build brand equity and stuff like that directly. Our show has helped grow Castos directly some, but more so, it has allowed us to make a lot of really good product and marketing decisions. The vast majority of our thousands of customers, I don’t know and don’t come from our listener base. That tells me that the podcast probably has helped us a little bit, but more than anything, we’ve built something that people really like.
Rob: And I would guess that the podcast has helped you more with a couple things. One, knowing what to build and knowing how to support people who are editing and posting podcast because you run a company that does it, know how to help folks who are creating podcasts, because you create one. You do have an expertise that most people even building podcast hosting SaaS apps don’t have. You have the whole gambit of being a listener, creator, and running a company that edits and produces them.
That’s one thing, but the other thing is I’m guessing that RougeStartups probably helped you more with credibility, perhaps with potential affiliates or partners like in space in the MicroConf world, they’d probably know you from RougeStartups. I’m guessing even PodcastMotor clients.
Those would be the folks that would email. I’ll admit, I’ve received at least—just over the years—probably two or three emails asking about, “Do you know Craig? Do you know about PodcastMotor? Are they legit?” that kind of stuff.
Early on, the way I first heard about you was RougeStartups. You spoke at MicroConf Europe a couple of years ago, you’re speaking again in two months, and the first time I invited you was because I had listened to you talk on this podcast for months and I was like, “This guy is sharp. He knows what he’s talking about. I think he’ll do well on stage.”
You would come to MicroConf and I believe we had met, but I meet a lot of people at MicroConf. It’s like you were in my ear buds literally six months or nine months and that was a piece of it. I’m not saying you speaking at MicroConf Europe, but you and I knowing each other has changed the course of anything, but that’s probably one of 50 examples that’s come out of it.
Craig: Yeah. Podcasting even here, getting into the fourth quarter of 2019 is probably the best use of time that anybody can put into personal branding. It’s wonderful. It’s really efficient from a time perspective. You just spend 45 minutes recording a show, edit it a little bit, or send it to somebody like PodcastMotor, or find a guy on Upwork to edit it for you, and then you get 45 minutes and a bunch of people’s ears every week. It’s just really impactful as a medium for building brand awareness, and getting your name out there.
Rob: You’re not just saying that because you run an editing service.
Craig: I’m hugely biased. Yeah.
Rob: Totally. Take it from someone like me who doesn’t run an editing and hosting service. I’ve been talking about this for years. Mike and I show up every week. We shoot a show every week and I stopped blogging years ago. I really want to blog, I just don’t have/make the time to do it, but I do make the time to podcast because it is so much less of an effort.
We need to talk offline about getting Startups for the Rest of Us moved over to Castos in the next couple weeks. Let’s figure out a good time for that to happen. We’re already on Seriously Simple Podcasting and my understanding is the move to get all of our files. Right now, for listeners, we set it up in 2010, so we literally have flat files, MP3, flat files, just sitting on a shared hosting account and a CDN over that.
We could have done Libsyn in 2010, they were the only host that I know of and they were so janky, and a lot more expensive than what we have because I have somewhat a limited shared hosting account. We’ve done that for nine years and frankly, there’s just a lot of challenges with that approach, I’ll leave it at that, and we’ve been looking at getting a legit podcast host for several years for the metrics and all that stuff, but it’s probably time we do it.
Craig: We’d love to.
Rob: Sounds great. Thanks again for coming on the show. I know folks want to keep up with Castos, they can go to castos.com. If they want to follow you, if they’re into podcasts of course, check out RougeStartups on iTunes, Stitcher, and all the other places. Where else might they keep up with what you’re up to?
Craig: The best place is probably on Twitter. I’m @TheCraigHewitt on Twitter and I tweet less often than I should, but that’s probably the easiest place to reach out and say, “Hey.”
Rob: Sounds great man. Thanks again for coming on the show.
Craig: My pleasure. Thanks.
Rob: I hope you enjoyed my interview with Craig. Again, if you have any questions that you’d like to hear Craig and I talk through on the show, please email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or call our voicemail number at (888) 801-9690. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
In this week’s episode, I speak with Craig Hewitt about how he went from his day job, to running a product-type service, to running a fast growing SaaS application called Castos; all this as a non-technical founder. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 459.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups. Whether you’ve built your fifth start up or you’re working on your first. I’m Rob and today with Craig Hewitt, we’re going to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made on our journeys.
Thanks for joining me this week. I’m excited to talk to Craig Hewitt. You may know him from his podcast, RogueStartups, where he has chronicled his journey over the past several years. If I recall correctly, that’s where I first heard about Craig. What I like about Craig is he has been doing this for years, 4½ years ago, he started a productized consulting service.
Two years later, he quit his day job. He acquired a WordPress plugin, he started Castos, which SaaS app for podcasts hosting. He’s built it up to the point where he has four full time employees, two part time employees and he’s part of our inaugural TinySeed batch.
You’re going to enjoy the conversation with Craig. We dive into a lot of stuff that he hasn’t talked about on his podcast and per the interviews I’ve been doing recently, I try to dig into some points in particular and not just cover a broad story, but really look at the important points along his journey, things he learned, advice that you can take away to help you build and grow your startup as well.
I want to do a little experiment this week, it’s something I haven’t done before. I talked to Craig offline and said, “You know? I bet folks will listen to this episode and they might have questions for you.” Whether it’s a question about how you did it, about your journey, about podcasting, about startups in general, just anything that you would like to hear Craig and I riff on and talk about, or frankly if it’s just for Craig, that’s okay too. I want to invite him back in probably two, maybe three weeks, and any questions that have been submitted, he and I can run through on the show. It’s a Q&A episode, but it’s a Q&A episode with a guest host and you have context about his experience.
As you listen to this episode, please try to think of a question or two for Craig and then email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and you can send that as a text question or attach it, Dropbox link to an MP3, or you can just call our voicemail number if you’re on your phone right now. It’s (888) 801-9690 and I’d love to have Craig back on the show, assuming we get questions, and we can run through those.
It could be an interesting and fun experiment to have these guests to come on the show, not just tell their story but also offer practical advice and tips. This is something I’ve been talking about for quite some time about how I’ve enjoyed a Q&A episodes because it allows all of us to be smarter.
The fact that I’m here on the microphone, talking in answering questions is good and I’ve been able to share knowledge along with Mike Taber for the past nine plus years. The community and everyone out there, collectively, we are all smarter if more of us can weigh in on these topics. I love to pull guests back on the show and do questions, so please do send any in, questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, if you have any questions for Craig. Maybe put “Question for Craig” in the subject line, that’ll help me catalog them. Let’s dive into the interview with Craig, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Craig: thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Craig: My pleasure. Thanks from me on, Rob.
Rob: I bet a lot of folks know who you are from your RogueStartups podcast. You’ve been known for several years—congrats on that, by the way—so many podcasts don’t even make it 20 or 30 episodes and you guys are at 170 something?
Craig: Yeah we’ll be at 200 around the end of the year.
Rob: Good for you. On these milestone episodes, everyone always tries to do something cool and interesting and I always find it hard to come up with new things. Have you been given thought to what you might do on that episode?
Craig: We have thought about it. We did a really cool episode at 100. It was a mash up of a bunch of little interviews that Dave did at MicroConf two years ago. We might do something similar to that, just talking about a little bit of everything, founder stories, lessons learned, stuff like that. I think those are really neat.
Rob: That’s cool. I was asking you because our 500th episode is coming up and I wanted to steal your idea and do it before you even do it. Of course I wouldn’t do that.
Craig: You’re welcome.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. The reason I wanted to have you on the show today well, there are many reasons, but one is you’re a non-technical founder who has built a successful SaaS app. Successful to the point that you have four full-time employees, two part-time, TinySeed, we backed you, you’re part of our inaugural TinySeed batch. Stuff’s really been going up into the right for you for a couple years now with Castos.
I wanted to walk through that story because starting a SaaS app is hard enough. Starting a SaaS app as a non developer, there are unique challenges with it. I want to take people back to where you started.
Now, you live in Annecy, France with your family, but you’re from the States. You were living in New Orleans, if I recall, and you were working a day job as a sales guy. Is that right?
Craig: Yes. I’m the dreaded sales guy at heart, which is actually a really nice thing. If you’re not a developer, you have to be a salesperson or a marketer. That’s what I bring to the table I guess, but yeah, I was in enterprise-level medical sales, so selling stuff the hospitals and doctors.
I started the podcast, started RougeStartups just really as a fan of entrepreneurship, software, SaaS, and stuff like that, online business. Ironically, that’s what led to my first business that was any kind of success. It’s called PodcastMotor, we do podcast editing and production, we’re a productized service. That’s what led me to quit my day job. We traveled the world for a little bit and ended up living in France. Then all the opportunities with Castos came along as a result of that. Podcasting has been the door through which all of this stuff has opened up to me.
Rob: Podcasting has been a great thread for you. Obviously, you’ve listened to podcasts for years, then you started your own, then you started a productized service that does podcast editing, and you have a quite a client list. As you said, PodcastMotor allowed you to quit your day job. Then, you have acquired a WordPress plugin that will get to podcasting and then turn that into a SaaS. It’s not often you actually see a thread like that where there are 4-5 different levels in the same space.
I do think that’s been one of your super powers is you haven’t wandered all over the place. You had invoicing software, then an SEO tool, then email service provider, and started a conference. You’d be an idiot to do something like that and wander all over the place. You have just been focused, but you’ve been able to do it in a much more succinct timeline. When did PodcastMotor start?
Craig: PodcastMotor started 4½ years ago. The very beginning of 2015.
Rob: You were working at a day job and you’re good at sales, presumably, that’s what you’re doing at 40-50 hours a week. The PodcastMotor process involved that super power, I’m guessing. There was a lot of demos in sales because it’s several hundred dollars a month for you to produce episodes for folks. I’m imagining, everybody wanted to get on a phone call. Did you find that that asset of being a salesperson and being comfortable with demos helped you a lot getting PodcastMotor off the ground?
Craig: Absolutely. At first, I was doing the sales calls, doing the editing, doing the writing, publishing to the hosting platforms and stuff, and then we built a team around it. For a very long time, actually up until just about a month ago, I’ve been doing all the sales calls. Just because I’m really good at it, we close a lot of customers, and like you said, we’re really fortunate to be able to work with a lot of the podcast that people that listen to the show probably have heard of.
It’s really cool. It’s been a really nice experience to be able to have relationships with folks like that, too, that we’re on a first name basis and able to email up a whole lot of these power players especially in our space.
Rob: PodcastMotor grew to the point where you were able to quit your day job and then fund other stuff you’re doing. Was there a point in the first, let’s say, 12-18 months where you were like, “Oh, […]. This isn’t going to work,” or, “Man, this is really hard right now,” or was it one of those Cinderella stories that I often say don’t exist?
My famous quote is, “Even in the Cinderella stories, blah, blah, blah, and there are no Cinderella stories.” I’ve been saying that. I don’t recall PodcastMotor being that hard for you to get off the ground. I guess, to summarize, what was the hardest part or the lowest point as you were building that?
Craig: It was both. It was really successful really quickly, which in a service business is really hard, because in a SaaS business, if you make it and a bunch of people sign up, there’s no more work for you other than maybe support. PodcastMotor is a relatively complex one to scale the team up, create all these processes, documentation, workflows and stuff to be able to handle to go from 5 customers to 30 is really hard. It was not hard in the fact that the business floundered, but that the business was successful, which is its own problems. That was the challenge. For a long time, I loathe the business because it was just a constant game of catch-up.
Now, I have a lot more respect for it because productized service model is absolutely fantastic for folks who are out there and they’re consulting or they have a day job and they want to quit their day job and go out on their own. There’s no faster, more clear way to do it than a productized service. There are some downsides, like scalability is a lot harder, but for folks who just want to quit their day job, there’s nothing better because it’s pretty simple.
Rob: I’ve never run a productized consulting… actually that’s not true. CMSthemer was that and that was a constant pain in my ass. I had a bunch of other stuff for products and CMSthemer was bringing in more revenue than a lot of them, but it was this constant back-and-forth with clients and I didn’t have enough volume to hire the staff to do it, so I was doing it a lot of it myself. Were you working the day job, then you’d come home and then you just work four, five, or six hours at night to keep up before you had the bandwidth to hire someone to replace yourself?
Craig: Absolutely, and that’s the hardest part in any business. Whether it’s a productized service or it’s a SaaS business, that time when you’re making a few thousand bucks to even $10,000 MRR is just really hard because you don’t have the time or the money to really do anything. That’s why stuff like TinySeed is really cool because your sweet spot with TinySeed is to take these folks that are that $5000 or even $10,000 and say, “Okay, stop messing around with your day job, go all in on this, and really dedicate yourself to marketing, or hire someone from marketing, or hire a developer, so you can go do marketing or something.”
That is the point that probably a lot of folks get burnt out on is, “I have all of these demands on my time and my mental energy and my stress is through the roof,” because yeah, you’re working a day job and you have family or whatever, then you come home, work on this, and there’s a fire to put out every day. If there’s no light at the end of the tunnel in some way, then it’s just really depressing sometimes, which is weird because then, you have this growing business that is making you depressed. It’s a strange thing, but that’s how it was.
Rob: Yeah, there’s so much to be said for the power of focus. The ability to just focus on one thing and not have a day job and side projects in addition to whatever it is you’re doing, and to your point about folks who have $5000 MRR or sub-$10,000 MRR and are depressed, shutting business down. I’ve seen that over and over and I’ve seen folks trying to do it nights and weekends for years, unable to get it past that point where they are able to quit the day job. It’s a real shame.
There are businesses that could have succeeded or could succeed faster if they just had a little more time and a little more of their best energy, the good glucose. Not the, “I just worked in an eight- or nine-hour day from my day job. Now, I commute home and I have three or four hours.” Even if I’m a developer and I can write the code, you’re just so tired, you’re not as productive, and you don’t get in the flow. There’s a lot to be said there.
Can you give us an idea of how large PodcastMotor is? I know you don’t talk about your top line revenue. Have you ever talked about number of clients or any idea, maybe even employee headcount? Something to give us an idea of the scope of the business?
Craig: We do about $30,000 a month and most of it is recurring.
Rob: That’s cool. How long after you started PodcastMotor were you able to basically quit the day job?
Craig: About two years.
Rob: Did it take that long to get to the point where it could provide a full-time income for you or were you working a job and also banking extra money in preparation for that event?
Craig: It was a little bit of both, it was more that we had wished we had a day in mind. We had a day in mind for a really long time, almost a year. My wife and I agreed, with some stuff with the kids and them finishing preschool, we wanted to quit around the summer so we could travel to Europe for three months. We just had a day in mind and the day included some personal stuff. It included PodcastMotor getting to a certain size so it could provide for us. I was in sales, so you’re making pretty good money which was allowing us to save up for this transition time, too.
Rob: I know it grew pretty well from the start. I almost would have thought the productized consulting given how quickly it can scale up, would’ve allow you to quit your day job before two years. It sounds like it would have if you really were desperate.
Back in 2008, I was just clawing and scratching to get out of the day job. The moment that I was able to, I quit If you had done it at the moment, that you had enough income to do it, it sounds like it would have been a lot sooner.
Craig: Totally. I mean, I’m always been reinvesting more back into the business than maybe I have to, and it’s venture for both Castos and PodcastMotor where the businesses don’t throw off as much profit as they could certainly, but I’m just always oriented towards growth. We were hiring team members, getting people in place, and doing all these things to where I didn’t get as much money. When I had a day job, I didn’t “need it,” but if I had to quit my day job or if I’d gotten fired, we could have lived off PodcastMotor pretty early on.
Rob: The next thing I want to touch on is your acquisition of a WordPress plugin called Seriously Simple Podcasting. This is a plugin that folks who run WordPress or want to run a podcast, they install the plugin and then when they do a new post, it allows them to upload an MP3 file and have that go into an RSS feed in iTunes, settings and all that stuff.
To the listeners, we on Startups for the Rest of Us were on PodPress for ages and it was abandoned. It did the similar functionality and it was abandoned six years ago. We just never upgraded because you just don’t do these things. You came in and generously offered to migrate us to Seriously Simple Podcasting. We’ve been on it now for about a month or two and really enjoying the more modern interface, the maintained code base, and all the things that we were lacking with PodPress.
This very podcast that runs on that plugin, but you didn’t build that, you acquired it. I wanted to dig in a little bit on that story. Namely, when did it happen in this timeline? Right now, we’re at two years after starting PodcastMotor, you’ve quit your day job. Did the acquisition happen before or after that? How did it come about? Just talk us through that process.
Craig: I had already quit my day job, we’re already in France, and it came about just an email from actually one of our PodcastMotor customers who is also in the WordPress space, emailed me and said, “Hey, the guy who’s the original creator of this plugin is selling it because he’s going to work at Automatic, the parent company of WordPress. I think you should talk to him. This sounds like a pretty interesting fit for what you’re already doing with PodcastMotor.”
I talked to Hugh Lashbrooke, the guy that wrote the plugin. Pretty quickly he was like, “Yep, this is a good fit because you’re a reasonable person, already in the space, you’ll probably take good care of it,” and we saw it as a way to expand what we’re already doing with PodcastMotor as a service business getting into a product business and SaaS, and the idea was always to build a hosting platform to connect to the plugin. The plugin, like all plugins in the WordPress repository, is entirely free and will always be entirely free. Now, the Castos hosting platform is an optional add-on to the plugin and we use the traffic flow and the lead gen from WordPress like our main source of business.
Rob: Did you think from the start, when you are evaluating the purchase of the plugin, was it in the back of your mind like this is going to be good traffic and lead gen flow to a SaaS app someday?
Craig: No, it was dumb luck. Very fortunately, but it turns out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.
Rob: That’s the thing. If I’ve learned anything doing all the entrepreneurship stuff, the podcasting, and being in public is doing things in public creates opportunity. I don’t care whether you’re blogging about things, whether you’re podcasting, whether you’re actually have a productized business, a productized consulting business like you do where you have a SaaS app, if you had not started a podcast then decided to do PodcastMotor, you would never have gotten that email. No one would pick you out of the blue and it happened to be, “Oh, this guy’s already in the podcast.” There was some warm relationships there, there was a recommendation by someone saying, “Hey, he’ll take good care of it because we already know he’s proven this and that.”
I often give this advice to folks who can’t ship, or who are either have been working on something for years, or thinking about it or, “I just don’t know what to do to start,” I often say, “Just start podcasting or start writing. Even if you want to ultimately do software products just get out in the world, build a small tool and ship it. Help bloggers, help podcasters, help developers, something that gets you out in the world and has your name in the footer.” You’ll be shocked at how many of these little things come along just from being out there.
Craig: One of the things we all discount too much is just the value of your relationships with human beings, talking to them on the phone, and meeting them in person and stuff. We go to conferences, like MicroConf, or like […] Conf, or whatever maybe once a year and you meet up with all of your online friends. That’s really great, but I think that, especially if you’re talking about developing business acumen and a real network, that we should all take this a lot more seriously than most of us do. I was definitely on that boat. I was like, “I have my computer and run a business.” Now, I could run a really good business without a computer and just talk to people and work it like a regular business, where it’s all the relationships and the people that operate in the business and that I know in the industry and stuff. It’s an interesting flip that that’s taken.
Rob: I’ve totally seen that in my career as well. A lot of it starts with nuts and bolts, providing a service in marketing in a funnel, split testing, and then at a certain point there’s a lower leverage activities for you now because now it’s working relationships, it’s building partnerships, it’s shaking hands, and like you said, at an event that can get you hundreds of customers right off the bat rather than grinding it out with AdWords as the case may be.
To give listeners an idea of maybe the magnitude of the plugin, I know you haven’t talked about purchase price, you don’t have to name an exact number but to give listeners just some context what realm of numbers did you pay for Seriously Simple Podcasting.
Craig: I paid mid-four figures for the plugin, and at the time it was an entirely free plugin with some add-on modules which are also free and had about between 10,000 and 20,000 active installs in WordPress.
Rob: That sounds like a good deal to me.
Craig: Yeah, it was a great deal.
Rob: Long term, knowing what it turned into, obviously was a genius maneuver that I know you architected from the start.
Craig: Oh yeah.
Rob: From day one, I knew it. But even then, it sounds like that was a good exchange. You acquire this plugin, this is your first exposure to WordPress. I know you’ve used it as a podcast host or whatever, but you first time owning and operating a plugin, how long after the acquisition did you think we should build a SaaS app to back this thing?
Craig: That was always the idea, was to buy the plugin, to build a hosting platform on top of it because the model had already been proven. There’s another player in the space that does a very similar thing. I think we do it better, but there’s someone else that already does the exact same thing, basically. Our idea was, “If there’s already a player doing this in a certain way, I think we can do it better, because there are some things about that tool that I don’t like and a lot of other people don’t like.” That was the idea from the beginning.
Rob: And the rest is history, to be honest. You build Castos, it’s a SaaS app, a big channel has been your WordPress stuff. I know you have a lot of other channels at this point growing the company. Castos is about 2½ years old, four full-time, two-part time folks. Successful SaaS app on all metrics and I know your MRR—we won’t announce it here on the show—but it’s successful by any measure.
I’m curious, there’s a couple questions I have for you. The first is, podcast hosting is a very competitive and almost I say quasi-commoditized space, there are a lot of them. It’s commoditized in the way that email service providers are. There’s differentiation. It’s not truly a commodity, but there are just so many that you could go out and throw a rock and hit three. What made you think that you could enter that space just 2½ years ago after there are already as many as there were and gain enough traction to build a real business on it?
Craig: Even now and for sure back then, the thing that sets us apart from most all other players is the plugin and our WordPress integration. It makes managing your podcast content just so easy. It is Seriously Simple Podcasting. All joking aside, you just go into WordPress, you create a post, you upload the file, and your podcast is live as opposed to, “I’m going to log into Libsyn, I’m going to go over here, upload the file, then I get this iframe code which is all janky, then take it back to my WordPress site, make sure the post is published at the same time and all this kind of stuff.” There’s none of that. You just manage all your content wherever you’re managing all of your content already, which for a lot of people is WordPress.
I still believe that if I wasn’t the owner of Castos, I would still use it because it’s the best tool for my workflow, because I use WordPress for all of my sites. I manage all of my content in WordPress, so it’s the obvious tool and I would tell anyone else that. If you have a site on WordPress and you want to start a podcast, it’s just the clear, easy, good way to go.
That’s our competitive advantage. I think we have a pretty good moat around that. It would be hard for somebody to create a plugin that does as much as we do, get the traction, the name recognition and everything. I’m sure somebody could and maybe somebody will after hearing this, and that’s cool. Competition is healthy, it validates the space a lot, but that at this point, we’re a long way down that road, so it’s a pretty defendable competitive advantage for us.
Rob: Early mover advantage with stuff like WordPress plugins, SEO. I often think of WordPress plugins just as another form of SEO. If you get a plugin with a bunch of five-star reviews in the WordPress plugin repository, then you appear at or near the top of the search results when people search for podcast plugin. It just dumps hundreds or thousands of people through your funnel. And it’s a free funnel, so it’s not like they’re eating your website, but they’re downloading the plugin and then from there, you nurture them. This is a playbook where we’re seeing folks do, whether they’re moving them towards the premium plugin add-ons to a free one or towards a SaaS app as you’ve done.
Craig: Free like a puppy Rob. WordPress and WordPress plugins are not free.
Rob: Indeed.
Craig: It’s an expensive channel to maintain, but a very high-quality one.
Rob: Yeah, no doubt. Again, coming back to non-technical founder, you don’t write code, but you’re a more technical person than most salespeople that I’ve met. It probably comes from you selling medical devices. You have that left-brain edge and I know that you’re savvy with some of the tech stuff, just not a coder yourself. I’m curious what the hardest thing has been for you as a non-technical founder building and maintaining a SaaS app?
Craig: I know that Jonathan, our early developer for Castos, listens to this podcast so he’s going to laugh when he hears this. At the beginning, it was just him and I. He’s been our developer since day one. He started about two weeks after we acquired the plugin. We have had quite the journey of how we communicate, how we plan, how we work together, and it’s just been really challenging. It’s not anything to do with him because he’s actually been really great and gracious and forgiving of me.
For most non-technical folks, learning how to communicate effectively, and maybe efficiently is the right word, with developers is the hardest part. They speak a different language, but just being really, really clear the first time about what you want to build and why, what the user experience is going to be and all of these things.
Even to a developer that is a western person, that native English is their first language—Jonathan is both of those, he’s from South Africa—even though I would consider him a really, really good senior developer, I would come and say, “Hey, I want to go build this thing,” and he would go build it. I would come back and say, “This is not what I meant,” and he would say, “Yeah, that’s what you said.” So, just some of those things. It’s not even just scoping a feature. It’s how we track, report, decide which bugs to fix, in what order, prioritize the workload and stuff. All of this project management stuff is just really challenging. At this point, we do a pretty good job of it, but for the first year at least, it was just fires every day.
Rob: Can you give me an example of one time that you remember where you feel like you really struggled and basically did an example of what you’re talking about?
Craig: I can’t think of an example, but the classic thing, actually I’ve heard Hiten Shah talk about this recently. He calls it dropping Hiten bombs. He’ll just come in and say, “Hey, we should do this thing sometime,” and then the person that “works” for you says “Wow, Hiten or Craig, thinks that’s a really important thing. I should go do that.” That’s the biggest specific challenge for me, is organizing my thoughts and my product road map into something that’s really predictable and clear, and that we can all follow in the same way, not just scattered message and Slack every day, and changing directions on a whim. That’s just an impossible way to work. Getting over that has been huge.
Rob: I can see that. It’s amazing that if you’re like me—you and I are similar in personality—you view yourself as a scrappy founder who just wants to get stuff done, worked a day job, you built something, you’re the same person you were 10 years ago, but you’re not viewed that way by the people you hire. When you have a team and whether it’s 4 or 40 people, you still feel like you can just brainstorm like you did back in the day with a co-founder or with a mastermind group, “Yeah, I’m thinking about doing this, this, and that.”
You’re right. The Hiten bomb concept, I’ve seen it over and over with founders of you throw out an idea and it just train wrecks everybody or your thought process is really anxiety-provoking. It can be really anxiety provoking. If you say something one day and then change your mind the next day and you’re like, “No, it was just a brainstorm. It was just something I was thinking.” Folks don’t know that, and they’re trying to get a job done. I wonder, is that just learning to be a manager? A boss? Or is it learning to be communicating with developers? Maybe both.
Craig: It’s definitely more of the former. Also being more mature. I hate to say that because I’m going to be 40 next year. I need to chill out a little bit about some of these stuff and say, “Okay, the house is not on fire. We have a really great product and plugin, and everything is super stable. If I can just keep my mouth shut for another two weeks until the sprint is over, then we can talk about this.” That’s where I am these days.
Rob: As we move towards wrapping up, it seems like a tangent question or whatever, but I know that especially folks who listen to RougeStartups or maybe who have their own podcast and are building their own product on the side might be wondering, do you feel RougeStartups as your podcast you’ve been hosting for many years, do you feel like that’s had an impact on your ability to launch and grow Castos.
Craig: Totally, and I think in two ways. One is that, it is what first got me into PodcastMotor which is the door that got me into running my own businesses and was the introduction that got us into Seriously Simple Podcasting. The other reason probably is the more applicable to everybody, is that it really is honed to my niche expertise. I am pretty knowledgeable about podcasting because I run a podcast and I run a productized service around podcasting where we help a lot of really good podcasters run their podcast. Now, I run a SaaS app and a WordPress plugin around podcasting.
I just have a lot of domain expertise around this. The show itself, probably like Startups for the Rest of Us, is a really good channel to get your name out and build brand equity and stuff like that directly. Our show has helped grow Castos directly some, but more so, it has allowed us to make a lot of really good product and marketing decisions. The vast majority of our thousands of customers, I don’t know and don’t come from our listener base. That tells me that the podcast probably has helped us a little bit, but more than anything, we’ve built something that people really like.
Rob: And I would guess that the podcast has helped you more with a couple things. One, knowing what to build and knowing how to support people who are editing and posting podcast because you run a company that does it, know how to help folks who are creating podcasts, because you create one. You do have an expertise that most people even building podcast hosting SaaS apps don’t have. You have the whole gambit of being a listener, creator, and running a company that edits and produces them.
That’s one thing, but the other thing is I’m guessing that RougeStartups probably helped you more with credibility, perhaps with potential affiliates or partners like in space in the MicroConf world, they’d probably know you from RougeStartups. I’m guessing even PodcastMotor clients.
Those would be the folks that would email. I’ll admit, I’ve received at least—just over the years—probably two or three emails asking about, “Do you know Craig? Do you know about PodcastMotor? Are they legit?” that kind of stuff.
Early on, the way I first heard about you was RougeStartups. You spoke at MicroConf Europe a couple of years ago, you’re speaking again in two months, and the first time I invited you was because I had listened to you talk on this podcast for months and I was like, “This guy is sharp. He knows what he’s talking about. I think he’ll do well on stage.”
You would come to MicroConf and I believe we had met, but I meet a lot of people at MicroConf. It’s like you were in my ear buds literally six months or nine months and that was a piece of it. I’m not saying you speaking at MicroConf Europe, but you and I knowing each other has changed the course of anything, but that’s probably one of 50 examples that’s come out of it.
Craig: Yeah. Podcasting even here, getting into the fourth quarter of 2019 is probably the best use of time that anybody can put into personal branding. It’s wonderful. It’s really efficient from a time perspective. You just spend 45 minutes recording a show, edit it a little bit, or send it to somebody like PodcastMotor, or find a guy on Upwork to edit it for you, and then you get 45 minutes and a bunch of people’s ears every week. It’s just really impactful as a medium for building brand awareness, and getting your name out there.
Rob: You’re not just saying that because you run an editing service.
Craig: I’m hugely biased. Yeah.
Rob: Totally. Take it from someone like me who doesn’t run an editing and hosting service. I’ve been talking about this for years. Mike and I show up every week. We shoot a show every week and I stopped blogging years ago. I really want to blog, I just don’t have/make the time to do it, but I do make the time to podcast because it is so much less of an effort.
We need to talk offline about getting Startups for the Rest of Us moved over to Castos in the next couple weeks. Let’s figure out a good time for that to happen. We’re already on Seriously Simple Podcasting and my understanding is the move to get all of our files. Right now, for listeners, we set it up in 2010, so we literally have flat files, MP3, flat files, just sitting on a shared hosting account and a CDN over that.
We could have done Libsyn in 2010, they were the only host that I know of and they were so janky, and a lot more expensive than what we have because I have somewhat a limited shared hosting account. We’ve done that for nine years and frankly, there’s just a lot of challenges with that approach, I’ll leave it at that, and we’ve been looking at getting a legit podcast host for several years for the metrics and all that stuff, but it’s probably time we do it.
Craig: We’d love to.
Rob: Sounds great. Thanks again for coming on the show. I know folks want to keep up with Castos, they can go to castos.com. If they want to follow you, if they’re into podcasts of course, check out RougeStartups on iTunes, Stitcher, and all the other places. Where else might they keep up with what you’re up to?
Craig: The best place is probably on Twitter. I’m @TheCraigHewitt on Twitter and I tweet less often than I should, but that’s probably the easiest place to reach out and say, “Hey.”
Rob: Sounds great man. Thanks again for coming on the show.
Craig: My pleasure. Thanks.
Rob: I hope you enjoyed my interview with Craig. Again, if you have any questions that you’d like to hear Craig and I talk through on the show, please email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com or call our voicemail number at (888) 801-9690. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
