Episode 606 | The Podcasting Landscape, Keeping Your Saw Sharpened, and Scaling Your Team with Craig Hewitt

Rob: Today, we have another great episode of Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This is episode 606, where I sit down with the founder of Castos, Craig Hewitt. He and I talk through podcasting. We talk about all the acquisitions that have been happening, podcast analytics, Apple versus Spotify. Then we switched it up and we talked about staying up to speed when you’re no longer doing a task day-to-day as your company scales.

We talk about keeping everyone on the same page as you grow. Castos now has 13 team members. Obviously, the challenges you face as a single founder are very different from what you face when you’re one of 13 people, and you’re just trying to keep the ship heading in the right direction.

Before we dive into that, our next round of MicroConf local events are scheduled for this summer. We have MicroConf Local in Chicago on June 21st and MicroConf Local in Denver on June 23rd. If you want to meet local bootstrappers in your hometown or want to make a short trip to join us, head over to microconf.com/locals to pick up your ticket. Remember that the MicroConf Locals are inexpensive. It’s just a few hours in the afternoon, so it’s a great way to dip your toe into the waters of MicroConf.

Currently, I plan to be at both the Chicago and the Denver event. If you can make it, it’ll be great to see you there. With that, let’s dive into my conversation. It’s not an interview. It really is just a back and forth conversation about a bunch of topics.

I always enjoy getting Craig Hewitt back on the podcast. With that, let’s dive into my conversation. Craig Hewitt, thanks for coming back on the show.

Craig: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. It’s been a while.

Rob: I know. Just three, four months? I think you came on for where they are now, TinySeed Tails season one episode.

Craig: Sounds about right. Yup.

Rob: Yeah, that was a fun one. Folks remember you, obviously, from TinySeed Tales. You’re the founder of Castos, which is public and private podcast hosting. In fact, it’s what this very podcast is hosted on, as well as our MicroConf podcast and TinySeed Tales itself.

I was pleasantly surprised earlier today. I wanted to install Chartable’s listener tracking. I guess it is download tracking, technical. I have the Castos stats. I think podcast stats are completely broken across most of the world, because I’ll look at one provider we used to use.

It had tens of thousands. I go to a different one and it’s a third of that number. I’m like, how can it be 10%, 20%? I was like, you know what, it’d be great to have a second provider. I already use Chartable for some other stuff. I was thinking, this is going to be kind of a mess.

There’s a prefix and I’m thinking, am I going to have to hire a WordPress developer to hack some HTML or RSS? You know where I’m headed. I just went to Google. I typed in Castos and Chartable. It was like, grab this little URL from them and paste it in your Seriously Simple Podcasting thing. It just worked, man. It was so cool.

Craig: Yeah. Both Chartable and Podtrac, the formerly independent podcast analytics platforms both acquired by Spotify a few months ago.

Rob: Both of them? Oh, I didn’t know that.

Craig: Yeah, both of them. That is one of the hottest topics in our industry lately. It’s like, hey, these independent third-party platforms are not independent and third-party anymore. What does that mean? Yeah, drama.

Rob: What does that mean? I know there are purists who say things like there shouldn’t be billionaires in the world or people who are really religious indie software companies only. As you get big and get bought, you sell out.

There’s, I think, folks who maybe think too black and white about it. But beyond that, maybe the zealots take on whether these folks should be independent or not, what are the pros and cons of both of them being acquired by Spotify?

Craig: I think the downside that I hear a lot is, obviously, Spotify will take that data and do things with it that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise about your podcast and your audience. How bad is that? I don’t really know. I think a lot of the decentralized, DeFi crypto folks are up in arms about it. Spotify itself is very much the closed garden kind of provider in our ecosystem as opposed to Apple, Amazon Music, and all these that operate open RSS.

I don’t have a super strong opinion. I think that it provides an opportunity for another player to come in and do the same thing that they did before, open source maybe and things like that. I think that could be pretty cool. Yeah, podcast analytics are super tough just by the nature of the distributed system. Spotify has a different way that they approach it, because they’re not an open system.

Rob: Yeah, I think that makes sense. It’s funny. I’m not an open purist like, oh, that open source software should be everything or that crypto and DeFi. Obviously, I own some crypto, but I’m not necessarily in that camp. It’s just like, okay, cool. Whatever works, let’s have a competitive space.

If the open source software is free and the best, like WordPress, for example, which I use on Startups For the Rest of Us and robwalling.com, or if Squarespace, Wix, and these other are better, if you’re willing to pay $15 a month, not have to deal with the conflicts, and constantly upgrading, I think I have 20 plugin updates that I need to run on these sites, which is the free puppy aspect of them, I like to see it competed out and for there to be more choice. 

However, one big hang up I have is with Spotify buying these podcasts, like all the Gimlet stuff now, I just don’t listen to it anymore. Anything that is Spotify exclusive. We have a five-account family plan. I have Spotify in my car, it has an app. I have it on my phone with me. I listen to it constantly. I was just listening to it right before this. And yet, the moment that they walled off the podcast, somehow, for me was almost offensive.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m what I’m used to. Podcasts should be open. They’re like email and HTTP. Or because I’m a podcaster, or if it’s just annoying that something that was once free, it’s still free, in essence, I guess with my account. But something that was once open is no longer.

Craig: Yeah, personally, we operate a lot in the open podcast ecosystem and in the WordPress ecosystem via our plugin there. I’m just a big believer in it. I didn’t come from a technical background, but open source is amazing.

Open source is amazing for the community, the developers, and the end users, but it’s also a really good business model. WordPress Automatic is an amazing business. There are a lot of different examples of it in different industries, where you have this open source tool that you can use however you want, and then there’s the hosted version or the managed version, Ghost, another popular example, like Fantastic CMS. It’s free. You can go install it on your DigitalOcean droplet or you can pay them $10 or $15 bucks a month. Those are for you. I think it’s great.

It creates a lot of community-based accountability, which I think is the most positive thing. It can be painful to make a lot of decisions, I think. If you get into the politics of open source, it gets messy pretty quick. But I think overall, it’s a really good thing for these bigger projects.

Rob: I didn’t plan to ask you this when we started recording, but I’m realizing we just touched on podcast analytics. You said they’re difficult because of the distributed nature of something. Why are they so hard? If I log into three different analytics platforms, we used to use Blubrry.

We use Castos now. I’m looking at putting Chartable on because it’s free and I already have it. I bet I’ll see a swing of 50%-100% in terms of download numbers. I know estimating subscribers, I’m not even going to go there because that’s just an estimate. I know that just raw file downloads are what you can track and see.

As a former developer, it seems like if it’s a partial download, at a certain point, you just don’t count it if it’s only 10%, 20%, 30%. But at a certain point, you do. If it’s 60% or 70% downloaded, I don’t know. There’s probably a number, and then everything else, you just look at the number of downloads. Why isn’t it just that simple?

Craig: I think there are two things. One is it should be relatively that simple. There are a lot of subjective decisions that we make when engineering around multiple downloads from the same IP address, how many do you count is one listen, and things like that. There are some subjective decisions we make, but there’s some guidance in the industry around how we should handle that.

We do benchmark our analytics versus Podtrac, and it should be the same with Chartable. It’s 10%, 15% off. If you see a bigger difference than that when you install it, I’d be pretty surprised. Yeah, it is all that kind of bots, crawlers, and artificial traffic that hit your RSS feed, especially depending if it’s on WordPress or on Castos, different traffic patterns in those two places. I think we have a unique challenge to solve in that respect.

I think the bigger challenge, if you look at podcast analytics versus web analytics, and Google Analytics or Fathom or whatever, we only have visibility to the file until it’s downloaded. If people want to know like, hey, can I get demographic information about my listeners? Can I see when they listened, for how long, and things like that? The answer is mostly no, because the file leaves our platform, and it’s just gone.

It’s on Pocket Casts on your phone and you don’t know. We don’t know when you listen to it. That’s the closed loop that a lot of people are looking for. Going back to Spotify, that’s where they really rock. They control the whole stack from the creator and advertising—they’re the advertiser. They have a closed relationship with the listener.

Rob: Okay, that’s good to know about that 10% difference, because I will take a peek at that and see Castos versus Chartable once I have enough data. With Spotify, do their downloads of Startups For the Rest of Us, would they show up in Chartable or in Castos? Because Startups For the Rest of Us is on Spotify. It’s also available everywhere else. Do they basically just download it once, and then they now distribute it? If there are 1000 people listening on Spotify and 20,000, listening everywhere else, it’s only going to show 20,001 downloads?

Craig: From our platform, yes. It’s because Spotify is the only platform that does exactly what we said. It takes the file from Castos, stores that on there and re-encodes it differently, and then distributes it from their system to their listeners. We have the option to not do that and have it be a pass-through kind of relationship like every other platform, but it would require us to re-encode the file that you upload to our system a certain way. We don’t want to do that, because we think that the file you upload is the one that your audience should hear.

Spotify says, hey, if you’re going to have a pass-through relationship with us, the file has to be this way, this way, and this way. We say we don’t want to have to do that for our customers that spend so much time creating this audio. We want you to be able to deliver that file to your audience.

Yeah, Podtrac and Chartable  should basically not track Spotify listens. That’s why you log into your Castos. You can if you directly submitted through us or if you just submit it through the Spotify podcast portal. They have a lot of analytics there. Just like Apple, a lot more in depth analytics than we have access to.

Rob: Right. Probably, I have not logged in. I probably need to, because I haven’t been counting those download numbers. Now I’m realizing I need to add them together. I know in Castos, you have a tab where if you connect it through your Castos account, you can then flip between the two tabs. It’s the Castos downloads and the Spotify numbers, where I assume you’re pulling it in from an API or something.

Craig: Yeah. Depending on your audience and where you’re located geographically, 20%-40% of your total audience is on Spotify.

Rob: Is that much?

Craig: Yeah, it depends. Internationally, it’s more younger generation, something like that, industry-wide.

Rob: Before TinySeed, after I left Drip, I had this idea that I wanted to make podcast analytics better, not do it on the server side, but basically go and acquire all of the client side apps that I could, like raise a fund and buy up anybody that would sell. Then you’d have real data if you combined Downcast with Overcast with Pocket Casts. Obviously, you’re not going to get Apple Podcasts. But if you bought five of them, 10 of them, or whatever, and had hundreds of thousands of users, at least you could kind of extrapolate.

It was right around that time that Apple launched their crappy analytics, where you can log in as it’s the podcast dashboard, and they started giving that information. I find that information not very accurate. It’s just way different than the Castos numbers, for example, or and the Blubrry numbers that we had.

Have you found those Apple numbers? They actually tried to give you like, how far people listen in and how many people there are, because they do have that client. Used to be iTunes now, it’s Apple Podcasts. What’s the consensus or is there a consensus around Apple’s numbers?

Craig: I think the consensus really broadly is a helpful indicator. It’s a directionality kind of level thing. But basing a bunch of your content decisions on that, it’s probably not helpful. It’s what I hear. I think that your idea and your hypothesis of that is right. Being able to access the end listener kind of behavior would be really helpful, especially for advertising, because they want to know about impressions, and that’s what it is.

I know that a lot of podcasting apps are quite privacy focused. I think, unless you bought them, you would have a hard time getting that data back from them. I think the hypothesis is good. The interesting thing about Apple versus Spotify in this respect is Apple is not incentivized at all to give you any of that data. Spotify, more so, because they’re monetizing that traffic. I think that’s the big difference.

Rob: Yeah, it’s such a trip. It’s still early in podcasting, I think. I guess you have a whole company based on it, so you probably share that. It just feels like it’s going to be built into all the cars, all the places.

Craig: Airplanes, yeah.

Rob: Yup, there’s a lot to be done there. 

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Let’s switch it up and talk about a topic that you actually brought up before we recorded, how do you stay fresh with the latest hotness when you’re not so close to the action anymore? This could be someone like myself who’s no longer a founder of a SaaS company. I’m still a founder of some other things. Or it could be you who used to, nuts and bolts, get in, do the blocking and tackling, and now you have 20 people working for you?

Craig: Yeah, we’re 13.

Rob: Thirteen, sorry. Why do I think you had 20? Approaching 20. I think I live in the future. I know that you’re probably still writing nitpicky marketing copy or ad copy somewhere, because at 13, that’s just not the right thing for you to be doing.

What are your thoughts here? How do you stay close enough to the metal that you feel like you’re able to strategize and that you’re not missing things because you’re not in it?

Craig: Yeah. I think that where we are is particularly challenging in this respect. I think that’s why I wanted to talk about it, because I’m sure you can relate, as we’re at the size where I don’t do a lot of real implementer level stuff. But we’re not 20 people, to where we have real directors, owner-level folks in every group of the company, to where I don’t have to really get into the weeds there. I do find myself, especially like sales and marketing, on sales calls and writing some marketing copy. Not as much certainly as I used to, but I do some of those things and answer support tickets every once in a while.

I find it challenging both in the context of what I asked or wanting to talk about in the question. How do you stay up with the latest marketing trends or sales, pricing models, and how to freaking run HubSpot, and stuff like that. The other side of that is, how do you not do a lot of that, and be able to take a step back and above, and think strategically about the business, and kind of be a CEO?

I think what I found, and this is interesting coming from a person that runs a podcasting company, is I read and listen to a lot more books now instead of podcasts, because I find that the temporal nature of podcasts makes them more trendy. To me, a book is more kind of evergreen. I can take the lessons away, and abstract the lessons away from a book, and implement them how I want and where and when in the business. Whereas, podcasts seem to be really super specific, and sometimes just very timely or not timely. That’s one thing.

I think the other part is just working with the people in our company that are doing the sales, or doing the marketing, or doing the support. Doing the product stuff, and just learning from them, and trying to stay up to speed with what’s going on and what they think are the best examples, and then pointing out UI patterns that we want to emulate and stuff like that.

I think at the end of the day, when I put my good founder hat on, it goes all the way back to hiring the best people who are able to bring me along in that journey through this valley of half pregnancy, because half the time, I’m a real CEO and half the time I’m in the weeds. For some period of time, I’m in the weeds and half I’m a real CEO. The folks on our team are able to help me stay fresh with what’s going on and help them make good decisions. The other part is just really being a leader.

Rob: Yeah, as you were talking, the thing that resonated most was about hiring the right people who can bring you along. I even think at a certain level, imagine if you had 100 employees or 500 employees, you cannot stay up on sales, design patterns, code, and any of the other stuff. That’s where you were saying, having directors or VPS who can stay up to speed on things.

It’s mostly a temporary thing, because when you hit a certain size, you being Castos, again, 20, 30, 40 people, I do think that you will stop wanting or needing to be up to speed. You just need good people who are up to speed. You need your implementers, your individual contributors, your designers to know design really well, and for them to hire those people who are inspired and think about it in their spare time.

When I was a developer, I used to bring books about software development to the beach. It was the nerdiest thing ever, but I was that person. It made me pretty good at my job, because I was thinking about it a lot, and I enjoyed it. I worked with people at Drip, some of whom are cool. They clocked in 48 hours a week, and then went home, and didn’t think about it. That was fine.

They were good folks who delivered. Then there were just those people who went the extra mile. They thought about product management over the weekend. It’s just different. I’m not saying better or worse, but you do need some of those people, because then they bring it back to the rest of the team. That’s what I would see.

They were the ones listening to the podcast reading the books. Then they’d bring back a new idea and be like, hey, so there’s this new innovation. It’s called flat web design. It’s called drop shadow or whatever, and then we’d get to debate it. But at least someone was bringing that into the team. I think that’s maybe what you mean by those folks who bring you along.

Craig: Yeah, at the end of the day, those are the folks who are going to bring these ideas to us and say we should do flat design, or we should do integration marketing, or we should do whatever. It’s my job to trust them that they have our best interests at heart.

I’ve communicated the vision of where we want to go. The idea they have is they think it’s going to get us there, and then just gut check that with what I know of things. Is that how it is for you? I’m curious about you. With TinySeed, it’s just at a different level.

Rob: Yeah, but it’s the same thing. I’ll give you an example with this podcast. I hired an assistant producer a couple years ago. He worked a bunch of good work for us over the past few years, and then he moved on. We brought in a full time person now who helps with all aspects of it. But he used to bring suggestions, because he would watch other shows and listen to other podcasts.

He was the one who said, you’re not really even sharing a tweet of the episodes, and so we started. I was like, that’s fine. It’s pretty low lift, a light lift to do that. Then he said, well, what if we started doing audiograms? I’m like, what are those? This was a few years ago, so you get out of touch with stuff. But he was my guy who was thinking about that stuff.

Then he said, can you record the video? I want to start doing short video clips and put them on social. I was like, it’s a hassle. Recording video, then we’re going to have to edit it, and then we have to tweet it.

Here’s how we made the decision. I said, let’s experiment for one month, so you’re going to do four of these. Then let’s see the time difference between that and an audiogram. Let’s see the views or the engagement difference. As it turns out, it was 2x-3x more engagement with a video. That’s how I view it.

Tracy brings stuff to us all the time like, oh, I want to try this new thing with the blog. It’s like, cool, let’s do an experiment over a short period of time, a month or a quarter. Let’s track how much mentally do I ballpark. Do I think this is going to cost us in time or money?

What are the odds that it’ll succeed? Is it even recent? If it’s a 2% chance of succeeding, that’s a no.  If I gauge it, deem it at 2% or we agree it’s a low. But if it’s probably got a 25%-50% chance, to me, that’s a pretty good bet to get another 1000 eyeballs or another 2000 views.

Craig: Yeah. I think podcasting with Andy Baldacci for our show, the thing I know he would add is you have to consider the outcome of that too, because it’s not binary. It’s not just, will this work or not? If it works, will the outcome be so much more that it’s worth the risk? I would just add that. I know that’s the thing he would say right now, because he always beat me over the head about it.

I’m sure that our team has a drinking game for me around this, but this is where we’ve implemented OKRs in our business in the last six months. This is where this really just puts all of that stuff in a good lens that is visible across all groups in the company and for me. We’re able to really sit down, make those strategic decisions, and then the implementation of it. Like you’re saying, it’s their ideas that come and we figure out how we’re going to reach these goals. On a quarterly basis, that’s the rotation, so it’s been helpful for us.

Rob: I can imagine. For me, staying fresh, like you already answered it for yourself. But for me, it is a lot of podcasts and books. I view my mental model as books are, like you said, more evergreen. They’re more strategic long term. There are some tactical books, but I actually don’t tend to read those anymore.

I used to literally read ebooks on how to run Facebook ads when I was running, but I just can’t. I’m not going to get in the weeds, because that’s going to change in the next six months. I know that I can go hire somebody who can do it way better than I could learn these days.

I still listen to podcasts. I struggle with interview podcasts. I try to make this show less about interviews and more about conversations. I have heard some pretty interesting conversations around new tactics that are coming up. There was someone talking about TikTok marketing for business the other day. As much as I don’t care about this, in depth, I don’t. I don’t care about the TikTok aspect. I do care that it’s a new thing, and should it be on my radar?

I view podcasts for me as fun, which most of my podcasts consumption is not around work, but the chunk that is around work, the 20%-30% that’s around business. I’m either keeping up with folks like you on the Seeking Scale podcast, or you and Dave on Rogue Startups, or Brian and Jordan on Bootstrapped Web, or I am listening to these shows that are throwing out the tidbits, the, hey, this is how someone’s doing TikTok or Facebook ads are really different, and they’re a lot more expensive, so I can put that in the back of my mind of like, okay, maybe I’m going to check that with a couple people, but is that the way this is moving now? It’s like information gathering for me and just trying to keep aware of the broader picture.

I would also say, for me, it’s a lot of conversations with founders like TinySeed and even MicroConf founders. That’s the other way that I keep up on something. Someone discovers something, posted in the Slack, or they ping me if like, hey, there’s this thing that’s working for us, and now I’m like, mental note A that that’s happening and B, that that person is now a resource. If someone just got LinkedIn ads to work, then you ping me in two weeks, and say, hey, do you know anybody with LinkedIn ads, or do you know how to run LinkedIn ads? I would say, I don’t, but that founder does.

That’s the other thing where I was saying earlier I’m not sure that we have to maintain expertise in these things. You don’t if you have a really strong network. You and I are in some Slack groups where the network is strong. If you had a question like, hey, I do want to run LinkedIn ads, you would just ask. You’d ask in the TinySeed Slack, you’d ask in the other founder Slacks that we share.

That’s probably the first place you’d go and be like, who’s running LinkedIn ads or who’s paying someone to run LinkedIn ads? People would weigh in, and that’s your shortcut. The network is a shortcut to certainly a better answer than googling it. Just a lot of thoughts.

Sorry, I turned that into a solo podcast there. In the early days, I talked about building a product, building a business, and then building a company—three phases. I haven’t gone super in depth into the specifics of exactly when that happens. Building the product is just the early scrappy days. You launch and until you have at least $10,000 a month in revenue, you’re still a product, and you’re just trying to find product market fit.

At a certain point, it becomes a business in the sense of your profit and loss. You just have to start thinking about it as this is something beyond just a hobby project or something beyond some code I threw up on the weekend. Company building, obviously, that’s where you’re at. That’s when you start thinking about hiring managers and you implement things like OKRs or Rocks.

OKRs and Rocks when it was two of you, and you were at $8,000 a month or whatever, it’s way over processed, over engineered. I think that leads me to my question. I’ve heard you talking a lot about Rocks and OKRs on Seeking Scale with Andy. So much, in fact, that I think I need to research it more, because I feel like for me, it doesn’t fit my style of work.

I’m not a process person. Tracy, who runs TinySeed program director. She is very much in the process, and that’s why she’s here, because Einar and I are not. OKRs and Rocks, which for folks who are uninitiated, it’s like setting monthly or quarterly goals, your annual goals, and then they all roll up to something, or they don’t, or whatever.

What has been your inspiration for pursuing these? Is it that it fits with your mental model, or is it that you got to a certain point when you’re like, oh, we need something better than what we’re doing now, because it feels like we’re maybe getting a little out of control?

Craig: Yeah, that’s a good question. An answer to that is we’ve done Rocks and now we’re doing OKRs. They’re very similar. For the size company we are, I think the difference is that OKRs can scale a lot more, because they can go at the company level, group level, and individual level. If you’d want where Rocks are just like a single set that is company and division level maybe, they’re both set quarterly.

The nice thing about them for me, and the reason we really liked them is it makes you. Now, for us, our team leads once a quarter say, what the heck are we doing? What’s important to us from where we are right now to 90 days from now? How does that relate to our annual or two or five-year goal?

It is how we start all of our group meetings each week. We say, hey, let’s open the OKR scorecard that we keep and see how we’re doing. In the Rocks world, those are the issues that come up. Like, hey, we have a roadblock here. We have developments behind here and marketing is slacking on leads. Why is that? Let’s talk about that and see how we can unblock ourselves and work towards achieving these goals.

I think longer term, the vision is that I will, again, move one step up in that goal setting stratosphere, and then the leads of each group will set, run, and report on those OKRs without me. I think that’s where OKRs are really powerful. It is a tool to give them the permission to focus on just a couple of things and a quarter. We’re still in super startup mode. We just want to do a thousand things. If you do a thousand things, you’re going to fail, so we do two or three things in a quarter.

We want to do them really well. We set really ambitious goals. We grade ourselves against those goals every week. If someone comes to me and says, hey, I want to start running LinkedIn ads, and we decided we’re going to only run AdWords, this quarter, we get to say no, unless there’s a really super compelling reason why we have to do it.

That has happened, but the answer is just no. This is our world for the next 90 days. Let’s focus on this and do it really well. I think it just helps everyone focus during that quarter, and then leading up to that quarter when we’re making those Rocks or OKRs in our case.

It’s almost like the little founder retreat. You get to say, hey, what’s important to me, our group, and the company in the next 90 days with a lens of, hey, in two years, we want to get to this point? I think if you’re less than five people, it doesn’t really make sense. Where we are, it makes really good sense. As we grow, it’ll be even more important.

Rob: Yeah, it reminds me of how I think about mission, vision, and values, where at five people, if you’ve come across it organically, great. If not, I wouldn’t force it. Right around that 10–15 mark, if you don’t implement something, it will implement itself. If you don’t create a company culture, one will be created for you, and you may not like it. They may not have the beliefs and be in line with the mission that you actually want to achieve.

I’m guessing the mission of Castos is not to serve podcast files to pod players. It’s like there’s something. There’s a higher level thing to bring audio to everyone or whatever. I don’t know if you’re public about it or if you have a mission that you’ve thought through yet.

Craig: Yeah, we do. It’s right on our website, tempo.castos.com. Everything about us is right there.

Rob: Yeah, this is really well done, man. You have a whole content guide. It says, our mission, “Build the most powerful platform to help creators create great content, and connect with their audience.” That’s pretty cool.

You have, how do we accomplish this and you have our purpose, our vision, or our values. If someone’s evaluating Castos as a potential employer, basically, if you have a job break out, then they can look at these things and link to themselves. Is this what I want to do? Is this fit?

Craig: I think as companies get larger and become more successful, I think that stuff is just so much more important. Everyone wants to work at Stripe because they know what they’re all about. We try really hard to be that darling, especially these days with those competitors. The market is, we are selling ourselves to candidates more than they’re selling to us.

Rob: Man, thanks for taking a few minutes coming back on the pod. It was great chatting.

Craig: It’s awesome. Thank you.

Rob: If folks want to keep up with you, obviously, you’re @TheCraigHewitt on Twitter, where you retweet extensively. I went and looked through your feed and I was like, he has a lot of retweets in it. It’s what I used to do when I was a little busy. When I’m too busy with Twitter, I actually retweet other people.

Of course, castos.com if they want to check out awesome podcast hosting for both private and public podcasts. Thanks again for coming on.

Craig: Thanks, Rob.

Rob: Thanks for listening to yet another episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, where you’d been listening for 6 or 600. It’s great to have you here. Thanks for joining me again this week. I’ll be back in your ears again next Tuesday morning.